Y. Thomas Hou named Bradley Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Y. Thomas Hou, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named Bradley Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
The Bradley Distinguished Professorship of Electrical and Computer Engineering recognizes faculty excellence. Hou will hold the professorship for five years and is renewable.
A member of the Virginia Tech faculty since 2002, Hou has done pioneering work in network systems and has made significant contributions in the areas of video streaming, Internet quality-of-service, wireless sensor networks, and cross-layer optimization for wireless networks.
Hou has been a principal investigator of 20 projects and co-principal investigator of 10 projects totaling $14.5 million. Most of this funding came from highly competitive programs, including the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. He holds five U.S. patents.
He has published two textbooks, seven book chapters, 90 journal papers, 10 magazine papers, and 115 conference papers. His work has made a significant impact on the networking research community and has collectively been cited more than 8,400 times. His h-index is 45, placing him among the most influential networking researchers in the world.
His research has been recognized with five Best Paper Awards and a Best Paper Runner-up Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Distinguished Paper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Among these awards are the prestigious 2001 IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award, 2002 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols Best Paper Award, and 2008 IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Award.
He received the prestigious ONR Young Investigator Award in 2003 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2004 for his research in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks.
In the classroom, Hou teaches courses in network architectures and protocols, multimedia networking, and advanced foundations of networking. He has advised six master’s degree and six Ph.D. students to completion. He has supervised eight postdoctoral researchers. He is currently advising six Ph.D. students and supervising a postdoctoral researcher.
Hou was named an IEEE Fellow in 2014 for “contributions to modeling and optimization of wireless networks.”
Hou serves as steering committee chair of the IEEE INFOCOM conference, the largest and highest-ranked according to Google Scholar conference on computer networking. In addition, Hou serves as an area editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, leading a team of 11 editors in the wireless networking area, serves as associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and as an editor of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Cognitive Radio Series).
He was a past technical editor of IEEE Wireless Communications and a past associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.
Hou chaired the NSF Workshop on Bridging the Gap between Wireless Networking Technologies and Advances at the Physical Layer in 2007 and served as a technical program co-chairman of seven international conferences, including the IEEE INFOCOM 2009 conference.
At Virginia Tech, Hou co-directs Virginia Tech’s Complex Networks and Security Research Laboratory. He received the Dean’s Award for Research Excellence in 2013 and a College of Engineering Faculty Fellow Award in 2008.
Hou received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York, a master's degree from Columbia University, and a doctoral degree from New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering. From 1997 to 2002, he was a researcher at Fujitsu Laboratories of America in Sunnyvale, California.
Dedicated to its motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), Virginia Tech takes a hands-on, engaging approach to education, preparing scholars to be leaders in their fields and communities. As the commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and its leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 240 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 31,000 students and manages a research portfolio of $513 million. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.
