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October 17, 2005 Vol.
77, no. 8F
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| EECS professor Edward A. Lee is
chair of the EE division and associate chair of EECS. He is also
a director of Chess, the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded
Software Systems, and is the director of the Berkeley Ptolemy
project. He received his B.S. from Yale University in 1979, his
S.M. from MIT in 1981, and his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1986. His
research interests center on design, modeling, and simulation
of embedded, real-time computational systems. (Photo Credit: Peg
Skorpinski)
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Professor
Minute with EECS professor Edward Lee
What first inspired
you to go into engineering?
I started out declaring that I would major in political science. I took
my first class, and the subject was nothing like what I thought it would
be. I switched to computer science after taking a class in scientific
computing. In my sophomore year, I had a roommate who was an engineer
and who convinced me to take some engineering classes, and I was on
my way.
To date, what has been the most memorable moment in your career?
After getting my master’s degree, I went to work at Bell Labs
in New Jersey. I was given the assignment of writing software for the
first programmable DSP processor to implement a modem. After reading
the memos describing the algorithms, I realized that I could improve
on the phase-locked loop used for carrier recovery. This was the
first time that I applied what I learned in school (Z transforms, in
this case) to create something fundamentally new and better than what
the high-powered Ph.D.s around me had come up with. It was very satisfying.
What do you like
to do in your spare time?
I like creating things that are aesthetically pleasing. Lately, I’ve
made art works out of found objects assembled together and painted as
needed. Stop by my office in 518 Cory to see a recent construction,
which embeds a laptop computer and some software I developed for EECS
20n.
What movie should every student see?
Disney’s “Fantasia.” As the sorcerer’s apprentice,
Mickey Mouse decides to try out the sorcerer’s craft and loses
control of it. Engineers are the modern sorcerers, whose craft is equally
mysterious to everyone else. And when engineers lose control of their
technology, they can do a lot of damage.
If you would like us
to feature your favorite professor, please e-mail his or her name to
engnews@coe.berkeley.edu.
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