Thomas Little

Thomas DC Little is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. He is Associate Dean of Educational Initiatives for the College of Engineering and is director of the Multimedia Communications Lab where he is involved in the development of enabling technologies and applications for networked and distributed systems. Prof. Little is Associate Director of the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center — a collaboration of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of New Mexico, and Boston University. Recent efforts include research in indoor optical wireless communications deployed opportunistically using lighting as a platform to achieve very high capacity–high density small cells. Other areas of his research include MANET and vehicular networking protocols, connected health technologies for smart rooms, and video streaming. Dr. Little has been a successful entrepreneur, as a founder TVisions, Inc. (Molecular, Inc.), in 1994 with Ralph Folz, and is active in mentoring the next generation of technology innovators.

In the role of Associate Dean, Prof. Little is responsible for programmatic and strategic activities that involve advancing the state of engineering education at Boston University to keep up with modern pedagogical advancements and the rapid transformation of digital communications and media technologies. His programmatic activities include oversight of the College’s professional master’s degree programs, distance learning, and the unique Late Entry Accelerated Program (LEAP) designed to accommodate graduate students in the Master’s Program who come from non-engineering undergraduate backgrounds. Strategic activities involve facilitating adoption of new entrepreneurial themes as part of our ‘Societal Engineer’ initiative through grant and alumni funding and by the introduction of innovation, management, and design content into the undergraduate curriculum. Finally, he has been tasked with understanding and developing a position on the rapidly emerging open-access education, social-media, and the use of pervasive ‘always-on’ devices that are fundamentally changing education. Prof. Little is active in K-12 outreach through programs sponsored in part by the NSF Smart Lighting ERC and participates in outreach classes each summer involving middle and high school students.

Dr. Little received the BS degree in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1983, and the MS degree in electrical engineering and PhD degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University in 1989 and 1991. He is a Senior member of the IEEE, a member of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.