Edward Ashford Lee (born October 3, 1957) 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 (EECS) 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 (CHESS),
the TerraSwarm Research Center, and
the Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center (iCyPhy).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.