Christo K Thomas

Welcome! I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. At WPI, I lead a research group, TRAIN Lab, dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research at the intersection of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI), and wireless systems. Our mission is to push the boundaries of next-generation computing and communication systems through trustworthy and resilient AI, with a strong emphasis on network optimization and cybersecurity.

Topics we are interested in include but not limited to:

• Resilience and interoperability under semantic communication and integrated sensing and communication frameworks
• Explainable and generalizable AI (e.g., causality and neurosymbolic systems) for next-generation computing and communication systems
• Foundation models tailored for networking applications
• Mathematical foundations of cognitive and reasoning-driven AI architectures

Research and Industry Experience

After my PhD, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Virginia Tech from 2022-2025. From 2012 to 2014, I was a staff design engineer on 4G LTE with Broadcom communications, Bangalore, and from 2014 to 2017, I was a design engineer with Intel corporation, Bangalore. During November 2020 till June 2022, I was a staff engineer on 5G modems with wireless research and development division of Qualcomm Inc., Espoo, Finland. I was a recipient of the best student paper award at IEEE SPAWC 2018, Kalamata, Greece, best paper award at IEEE ICSCC 2025, and received third prize for his team titled “Learned Chester” ML5G-PHY channel estimation challenge, as part of the ITU AI/ML in 5G challenge, conducted at NCSU, US, 2020. I had presented multiple tutorials on approximate Bayesian inference techniques at several IEEE conferences such as ICASSP and EUSIPCO, and a tutorial on AGI-native networks at IEEE GLOBECOM. I have also edited a Wiley-IEEEPress book on semantic communications and is co-author of a visionary paper on AGI-native networks in Proceedings of IEEE.

Education

• Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, EURECOM (Sorbonne University), France, 2020
• M.S. in Telecommunications, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India, 2012
• B.S. in Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Calicut, India, 2010