Francis Fan Lee ’50, SM ’51, PhD ’66, a former professor of MIT’s Division of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science, died on Jan. 12, some two weeks shy of his 97th birthday.
Born in 1927 in Nanjing, China, to professors Li Rumian and Zhou Huizhan, Lee discovered English from his father, a school member within the Division of English on the College of Wuhan. Lee’s mastery of the language led to an interpreter place on the U.S. Workplace of Strategic Companies, and ultimately a passport and permission from the Chinese language authorities to check in the US.
Lee left China by way of steamship in 1948 to pursue his undergraduate training at MIT. He earned his bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in electrical engineering in 1950 and 1951, respectively, earlier than going into business. Round this time, he turned reacquainted with a pal he’d identified in China, who had since emigrated; he married Teresa Jen Lee, and the 2 welcomed kids Franklin, Elizabeth, Gloria, and Roberta over the subsequent decade.
Throughout his 10-year industrial profession, Lee distinguished himself in roles at Ultrasonic (the place he labored on instrument kind servomechanisms, circuit design, and a missile simulator), RCA Camden (the place he labored on an experimental time-shared digital processor for division retailer point-of-sale interactions), and UNIVAC Corp. (the place he held quite a lot of roles, culminating in a stint in Philadelphia, planning next-generation computing programs.)
Lee returned to MIT to earn his PhD in 1966, after which he joined the then-Division of Electrical Engineering as an affiliate professor with tenure, affiliated with the Analysis Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). There, he pursued the topic of his doctoral analysis: the event of a machine that may learn printed textual content out loud — a tremendously bold and sophisticated objective for the time.
Work on the “RLE studying machine,” because it was referred to as, was inherently interdisciplinary, and Lee drew upon the influences of a number of contemporaries, together with linguists Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky, and engineer Kenneth Stevens, whose quantal principle of speech manufacturing and recognition broke down human speech into discrete, and restricted, combos of sound. One in every of Lee’s biggest contributions to the machine, which he co-built with Donald Troxel, was a intelligent and environment friendly storage system that used root phrases, prefixes, and suffixes to make the real-time synthesis of half-a-million English phrases potential, whereas solely requiring about 32,000 phrases’ value of storage. The answer was emblematic of Lee’s artistic strategy to fixing advanced analysis issues, an strategy which earned him respect and admiration from his colleagues and contemporaries.
In reflection of Lee’s outstanding accomplishments in each business and constructing the studying machine, he was promoted to full professor in 1969, simply three years after he earned his PhD. Many awards and different recognition adopted, together with the IEEE Fellowship in 1971 and the Audio Engineering Society Finest Paper Award in 1972. Moreover, Lee occupied a number of essential roles inside the division, together with over a decade spent because the undergraduate advisor. He persistently supported and advocated for extra funding to go to ongoing skilled training for college members, particularly those that had been not junior college, figuring out ongoing growth as an essential, however often-overlooked, precedence.
Lee’s analysis work continued to straddle each novel inquiry and sensible, business software — in 1969, along with Charles Bagnaschi, he based American Knowledge Sciences, later altering the corporate’s title to Lexicon Inc. The corporate specialised in producing gadgets that expanded on Lee’s work in digital sign compression and growth: for instance, the primary commercially accessible speech compressor and pitch shifter, which was marketed as an academic instrument for blind college students and people with speech processing problems. The machine, referred to as Varispeech, allowed college students to hurry up written materials with out shedding pitch — a lot as fashionable audiobook listeners velocity up their chapters to soak up books at their most well-liked fee. Later improvements of Lee’s included the Time Compressor Mannequin 1200, which added a movie and video part to the speeding-up course of, permitting tv producers to subtly velocity up a film, sitcom, or commercial to exactly fill a restricted time slot with out having to resort to creating cuts. For this work, he obtained an Emmy Award for technical contributions to modifying.
Within the mid-to-late Nineteen Eighties, Lee’s influential educational profession was dropped at a detailed by a sequence of deeply private tragedies, together with the 1984 homicide of his daughter Roberta, and the following and sudden deaths of his spouse, Theresa, and his son, Franklin. Reeling from his losses, Lee in the end determined to take an early retirement, dedicating his vitality to therapeutic. For the subsequent 20 years, he would discover the world extensively, a nomadic second chapter that included a number of street journeys throughout the US in a Volkswagen camper van. He ultimately settled in California, the place he met his final spouse, Ellen, and the place his full of life mental life endured regardless of diagnoses of deafness and dementia; as his household recalled, he loved enjoying video games of Scrabble till his remaining weeks.
He’s survived by his spouse Ellen Li; his daughters Elizabeth Lee (David Goya) and Gloria Lee (Matthew Lynaugh); his grandsons Alex, Benjamin, Mason, and Sam; his sister Li Zhong (Lei Tongshen); and household pal Angelique Agbigay. His household have requested that presents honoring Francis Fan Lee’s life be directed to the Hertz Basis.
