Dr. Tran Khai Thien leads Thor Research Lab. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, VNU-HCM, in 2021, following an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Information Technology, VNU-HCM, and a BSc in Information Technology from the University of Science, VNU-HCM. He has served as Head of the Department of Digital Technology at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Industry and Trade since 2025, and previously headed the Department of Software Engineering at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages and Information Technology from 2013 to 2025.

His research concerns natural language processing and multimodal data analysis, with Vietnamese as the consistent object of study. His earlier work addressed sentiment analysis for Vietnamese, covering lexicon construction, contextual valence shifting, opinion target extraction and the identification of implicit aspects. More recent work has moved toward large language models and multimodal reasoning, including fact verification through multi-agent debate, rumor and clickbait detection, hate speech detection, Text-to-SQL, and prompting strategies for mathematical reasoning. Alongside these, he has contributed openly released resources, among them a Vietnamese clickbait dataset and a Python library for toxic comment detection.

He is the author of around forty international publications, close to half of which appear in SCIE or Scopus Q1 and Q2 venues. These include IEEE Access, Computers and Electrical Engineering, ICT Express, Enterprise Information Systems, Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, Applied Sciences, SoftwareX and Discover Artificial Intelligence, as well as conferences such as ACIIDS, MIWAI, IALP and ROCLING. He currently serves as Guest Editor of the special issue Deep Learning for Multimodal Data Processing at Discover Artificial Intelligence (Springer Nature).

He has been principal investigator on three institutional research projects and is the primary supervisor of six doctoral students, all of whom have published in SCIE or Scopus indexed venues during their candidature. He has received Certificates of Merit from the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee (2024), the Ministry of Education and Training (2022) and the Vietnam Education Trade Union (2020).

Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Multimodal Learning, Large Language Models, Information Extraction, Vietnamese Language Resources