Edward Ashford Lee is a Puerto-Rican-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and author. He is Professor of the Graduate School and Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley. Lee works in the areas of cyber-physical systems, embedded systems, and the semantics of programming languages. He is particularly known for his advocacy of deterministic models for the engineering of cyber-physical systems. Lee has led the Ptolemy Project, which has created Ptolemy II, an open-source model based design and simulation tool. He ghost-edited a book about this software, where the editor of record is Claudius Ptolemaeus, the 2nd century Greek astronomer, mathematician, and geographer. The Kepler scientific workflow system is based on Ptolemy II. From 2005 to 2008 Lee was chair of the Electrical Engineering Division and then chair of the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. He has led a number of large research projects at Berkeley, including the Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems, the TerraSwarm Research Center, and the Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center. Lee has written several textbooks, covering subjects including embedded systems, digital communications, and signals and systems. He has also written a general-audience book, Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology, where he argues that humans are coevolving with technology in a Darwinian way.
Biography
Lee was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1957. His father, a prominent businessman and later a bankruptcy lawyer, was a descendant of notable Puerto Ricans Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, a poet and playwright, and Bailey Ashford, a pioneering physician in the treatment of tropical anemia. His mother was originally from Kentucky, but moved around the country many times following her career Army father, Charles P. Nicholas, a mathematician who worked on scientific intelligence during World War II. Nicholas went on to serve as a member of the original organizing team for national Central Intelligence, and later moved to West Point, where he became head of the Math Department at the United States Military Academy. At age 14, Lee left home to attend the Lawrenceville School, a boarding school in New Jersey. From there he went to Yale University, where he flitted between majors before settling on a double major in Computer Science and Engineering and Applied Science. In 1979, Lee was hired by Bell Labs, which paid for him to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Science Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1980. He then moved back to New Jersey to work at the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, where he met his future wife, Rhonda Righter. At Bell Labs, Lee worked on the world's first software-defined modem. In 1982, Lee returned to school to get a PhD in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. In 1986, he finished his PhD and was hired to the faculty at Berkeley, where he has been ever since. In 2018, Lee retired from teaching to focus full-time on research and writing.
Books
The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines
Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology
Introduction to Embedded Systems: A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach
System Design, Modeling, and Simulation using Ptolemy II
