Look Who's Talking!

Peter Lee
Professor and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education
School of Computer Science

Handling three jobs at once, Peter Lee has unique juggling skills...come meet the Associate Dean who loves cars, karate, and big cities!

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? Where are you from originally?
I was born in Ohio, but I grew up almost entirely in a little town called Houghton, in Michigan. It’s really an isolated place, about 600 miles North of Detroit. From there, I went to the “big city” of Ann-Arbor, Michigan, for college at the University of Michigan. I dropped out of high school before entering 11th grade—living in the small town didn’t set well with me, so I left! And I applied to many schools—I actually wanted to come to Carnegie Mellon—but of course, as a high school drop out, it was hard to get admitted. But the University of Michigan put me on academic probation and gave me a chance. Between my junior and senior year of college, I came to Carnegie Mellon for half the summer, fell in love with the place, and applied here again for graduate school…and I was rejected again! [Laughs]
I then decided to stay at Michigan and finished my PhD there. Then 1987, upon the third time around, I finally got “admitted” here, and am now on the faculty here! [Laughs]

What do you like best about your job?
Interacting with students is really the main thing I like. Whenever I’ve given any thoughts about doing something else or going somewhere else, I think it’s always the students in the end that have made me decide not to change.

What do you like least about your job?
Every professor, in a place like this, is struggling to find an undistracted space, both in time and physical space, for doing research. That struggle is relentless, because there are so many demands on one’s time. There are some demands that are intensely deadline driven—I have to come up with a lecture twice a week; there are lots of service obligations; lots of committees; obligations to the country, to the government, and to society. I’m basically an optimist, and I usually think, ‘oh, in two weeks, as soon as I get past this deadline, things will get a little bit easier.’ But that’s never true! There’s just always something else! It gets frustrating, and then balancing that with personal life adds to the pressure. So, overall, I just have a gut feeling that most everyone here is just a little too busy.

What’s your favorite aspect of computer science?
My background is more on the theoretical side than on the applied side. So some of the mathematical structures and theories are intensely beautiful—cosmically beautiful! I have this fundamental belief that if something is that beautiful it has to be right. It would be some cruel hoax by God if something that beautiful weren’t the right way to think about how to do it! And the cool thing with the kind of research I do is that quite often, some really beautiful structures derived out of logic and mathematical structures really do have direct practical applications—and it’s really fantastic when that happens. It kind of confirms a fundamental belief that beauty and pragmatics go hand in hand.
Also, research here tends to be a collaborative effort…and it’s amazing how much you learn when you are doing research with a collaborator.

Do you think the image of the stereotypical computer scientist is changing?
Not fast enough! [Laughs]
I think that computer science, in the general public’s mind, is still connected with hacking, or with a lot of gruesome programming…computer science is just so much more interesting than people think.

Did you always want to teach?
Well, “always” is hard to say…I first had a real teaching experience in graduate school, when I first became a teaching assistant. I liked it so much that I ended up being a teaching assistant every year, for four years. So that’s when I really came to love teaching…and I’ve taught ever semester since I’ve come here.

So you seem to kind of be juggling 3 jobs at once right now—you are a professor, you’re doing your research, and you’re an Associate Dean—so how do you balance it all out?
It’s not really possible to do a good job in all 3 all by yourself [Laughs]. So when I took up a position as Associate Dean, I scaled back my teaching. I have been involved in teaching every semester, but I insert myself in teaching situations in which I have one or two co-teachers teaching with me. I don’t think I would have been able to do it any other way. Actually, I can’t ever imagine myself not being in the classroom…I don’t’ know if I’m being silly, but something about me would feel very insecure or bad…it would just feel unnatural. So while I've been Associate Dean, I've inserted myself in courses like 15-211 [Fundamental Data Structures and Algorithms], where there will be one or two, or even three other instructors working with me. That dramatically reduces the load for me—the other instructors can really carry the course, and I can just have the luxury of popping in every once in a while to give a lecture, which is fun. [Laughs]

The research also suffers when you try to do these multiple things. So if I weren’t Associate Dean, I would typically have 6 to 8 graduate students. After taking up this position, I scaled back to 3 or 4—I think I have 4 graduate students right now. That has a direct impact on the amount of research activity I do. I think I try to do a very good job in all three aspects of my work, but I’ve had to scale back to the quantity of what I do to keep the quality up.

What classes do you teach? You mentioned 211, but anything else?
I’ve been teaching three different kinds of courses in the last 5 years: 211, in which I’ve been involved in as one of several instructors; 411, which is the compiler design course. That is really a fun class—it typically has about 30 students, and none of them have to be there. I set up the course so it’s project oriented, and the projects are self-graded, so I don’t have to do any grading—the students devise their own test cases, and everyone has to test their compilers on everyone else’s test cases. So that’s a fun and easy class to teach; and then, very occasionally, I teach a graduate seminar on advanced compiling.

Let’s shift gears a little now…onto the more personal side…from all the experiences you’ve had at Carnegie Mellon, what’s been your most cherished memory?
oh…wow, most cherished memory…

Well, first of all, I should probably ask how long have you been at Carnegie Mellon?
I’ve been here since 1987…so I’m finishing my seventeenth year, even though it feels like two! [Laughs]

So thinking of a cherished memory will probably be pretty hard…if you can’t think of one, you can tell me of a couple?
Well, I think the events that are most special are like, for example, when I have a grad student who finishes a PhD. So I’ve had 13 of those students so far. One that sticks out the most is my first grad student, Olin Shivers, who is now a professor a Georgia Tech. Olin is memorable not only for being the first graduate student I had, but he was also a really colorful character, and has been a really close friend...

Wow, this is such a hard thing to think about! There are really so, so many things that have happened! I pretty frequently have students, both undergraduate and graduate, over to my house, for dinner—or I have regular video game nights at my house. Those are kind of silly social things, but sometimes things happen that are really touching. Those are nice because they sometimes involve my wife or my family.

Being a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon sometimes opens doors to some really interesting situations. Once I was able to use my association with Carnegie Mellon to get involved with the Penske Racing team, and that was a really great experience…

Actually, it’s impossible to answer this question properly! [Laughs]

Complete this sentence: when the going gets tough I…
Smile and charge forward! [Laughs]

When’s your birthday?
November 30th.

Where’s your favorite place to go in da ‘Burgh?
I would say my 3rd floor workshop in my house.

And what’s in this workshop?
Well, half of it is a painter’s studio—my wife paints—so that’s not my half. And the other half has some electronics equipment, that I like to tinker with, and car parts. For a while, I was working intensely on cars.

Wow, ok, so what other hobbies or passions do you have outside of your work? You mentioned video games and the car parts, but anything else?
I’m fairly seriously involved in karate right now. It’s something I did as a child, and stopped when I got more involved in high school sports (like football and swimming). But then my son reached an age where he wanted to get into karate, so I got back into it with him. In fact, I’m teaching in a karate school once a week.

I’ve had a long time interest, nearly 25 years, in cars and car racing. When I had my son, I had to curtail my racing activities for a while. But he’s 6 years old now, and this past winter he started to express an interest in wanting to learn how to drive, and so I’m hoping to get back into the karts—racing karts—this spring.

Also, I guess I’m fairly geeky, and so I do tinker with some open source projects that have to do with video services, and it’s fun.

So have you ever taken apart one car and created your own?
Oh, yeah, yeah, sure! At one point, I had 5 cars (not all of them in one piece), but we built large parts of several cars. I have a particular attachment to small roadsters. But then there’s also something called the WAF—the Wife Annoyance Factor—because of the time and inconvenience these things cause! But it’s really a fun thing. Right now I’m down to one car, and it even has a back seat! This is the first car I have had that has a back seat! [Laughs]

What’s your dream vacation like?
[Laughs]
You know, I’ve traveled all over the world, and I’m on the road at least twice a month, but I’ve never in my life gone to anywhere tropical, so that’s what I’d really like to do. Somehow, I feel like I’ve almost reached the age now where I could really use the standard tropical island vacation!

What’s your favorite food?
I like Korean food the best, and my favorite is probably the Pork Bulgogi, which is kind of a broiled, sweet and hot, marinated pork.

What would you have done in another life if you didn’t go into technology/academic life?
There was a time when I would really think a lot of being a racecar driver. I remember when I was a college student, there was a time when I was thinking that I wouldn’t mind trading places with Paul Newman! [Laughs]

People tell me that things I say—even outrageous lies—are believed by others. So, sometimes, half joking, I think that I could have tried politics…but I guess that’s a pretty cynical thing to say!

What is your favorite quote?
"Out of intense complexities emerge intense simplicities.” Winston Churchill said that, and I always interpret it as being relevant to the kind of research I like to do—the best solutions to complex problems ought to be very simple. Of course, Churchill was talking about global politics and war, but I think it applies equally well to computer science.

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