Francis F. Lee

Francis Fan Lee
Francis F. Lee (2015)
Born	(1927-01-28) January 28, 1927 (age 90) Nanjing, China
Nationality	American

Francis Fan Lee (李凡, born January 28, 1927) is an inventor, entrepreneur, and professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was born January 28, 1927 in Nanjing, China, and became a naturalized US citizen on November 15, 1954. Lee is the founder of Lexicon (company) (originally American Data Sciences). He is best known for three inventions: the Digital Cardiac Monitor (1969), the Digital Audio Signal Processor (1971), and the Digital Time Compression System (1972). In 1984, Lexicon won an Emmy Award for Engineering Excellence for the Model 1200 Audio Time Compressor and Expander, widely used in the television industry.

In September 1948, during the Chinese Civil War, Lee left Shanghai aboard the USS General W.H. Gordon to complete his undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied Electrical Engineering and earned his Bachelor of Science in 1950 and Master of Science in 1951. In Fall 1952, Lee entered the PhD program at MIT. He withdrew in 1954 to pursue his career, returned in 1964, and completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1965.

In 1954, Lee took a full-time position as Research Engineer with the Servomechanism Laboratory. He was part of a team working on the first Digitally Controlled Milling Machine In 1955, Lee joined the Bizmac Computer Division of RCA. He left a year later to join the UNIVAC super-computer division of Remington Rand.

In 1963, Lee accepted a one-year appointment to work on Project MAC, a time-sharing Multiple Access Computer being developed at MIT under the direction of Robert Fano. Fano launched Project MAC with a 6-week summer session that drew 57 people (including Lee) from universities, industry, and government for brainstorming and collaboration. At the end of the session, Lee described his work on speeding up computer memory in "Lookaside Memory Implementation" (1963). Six years later, Lee presented "Study of Look-Aside Memory," at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) conference: Transactions on Computers, held in June 1969. Lee's paper was published in IEEE Transactions on Computers. Look-Aside Memory is a forerunner of cache memory.