Thomas Chen

Thomas hails from suburban northern New Jersey and graduated from the Academy for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering. His first research experience was at the Center for Solar Terrestrial Research (CSTR) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), where he worked on understanding solar flares, sunspots, and coronal jets using the SunPy solar data analysis environment.

Thomas discovered his passion for computer science when he had the opportunity to conduct applied computer vision research with a graduate researcher at MIT. Under his mentor’s guidance, he developed interpretable convolutional neural networks for infrastructure damage assessment after natural disasters using multi-temporal change detection, subsequently publishing a peer-reviewed paper in NeurIPS, one of the top computer science research conferences globally. The paper has been cited multiple times in the scientific literature. From this project, Thomas was inspired by the power of computing, particularly in the scope of harnessing deep learning and artificial intelligence for humanitarian good (e.g. adapting to climate change). He continued pursuing this field on his own, working on independent projects such as training AI that classifies butterfly species. Thomas additionally has a particular interest in machine learning applications for particle/high-energy physics and heliophysics.

Outside of research, Thomas is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) U.S. Technology Policy Committee and was a 2021 ASAPBio Fellow. He was also an avid competitor in speech/debate, earning an Outstanding Distinction from the National Speech and Debate Association and placing 5th nationwide in Congressional Debate. Using the public speaking skills he gained from this activity, Thomas has given many talks at international conferences and workshops on his scientific work, including at the Open Data Science Conference, AAAI Spring Symposium, ACM SIGGRAPH, Applied Machine Learning Days, Machine Learning Summit, European Geosciences Union, European Space Agency, NASA’s Lunar and Planetary Institute, the American Astronomical Society, NOAA Climate Prediction Center, Caltech, and CU Boulder. He enjoys hiking and traveling in his free time.

At Columbia, Thomas is excited to build a strong technical foundation in engineering and the applied sciences while also exploring his interests in the humanities, such as history and linguistics. He also hopes to pursue further research in AI and computer vision.