Credit: ctl
NIST’s Mr. Kang B. Lee, a long-time NIST staff member and currently an associate with the Industrial Wireless Systems Project team after his retirement, was honored with the 2024 IEEE Standards Association Lifetime Achievement Award “for three decades of tireless leadership and dedication to the development and promotion of IEEE precision time protocol and other standards profoundly impacting global industry and commerce.”
On December 8, 2024, Lee received his Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 IEEE Standards Association (SA) Awards Ceremony held in Somerset, New Jersey. At this annual event, the IEEE SA recognizes outstanding participation across a variety of areas including standards development and standards-related work, leadership, and distinguished service. The IEEE SA Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes significant technical contributions and a 15+ year commitment to standards development within IEEE and other standardization activities.
Lee’s Lifetime Achievement Award description recognized his lengthy career, tireless leadership and dedication, and outstanding contributions, including leading and contributing to many standards efforts and organizing and chairing many IEEE conferences, symposia, and workshops. At the start of his career (1974) at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), Lee worked on various sensory feedback control techniques on machine control and software error compensation systems, and then explored the development of smart sensor technology for smart manufacturing and production. He led a team of six hardware and software engineers and machinists to apply the resulting technology to develop and deliver two advanced manufacturing production stations to the U.S. Navy machine shops for producing precision parts on demand for the timely maintenance of submarines in Mare Island and Portsmouth, respectively. Then Lee aimed to standardize the results of these smart sensor works by organizing the 1994 Smart Sensor Interface Standard Conference held at NIST, and subsequently became the Chair of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society (IMS)’s Technical Committee on Sensor Technology to champion the development of the Smart Transducer Interface Standards for Sensors and Actuators, known worldwide as IEEE 1451.
In 2000, Lee worked with Dr. John Eidson of Hewlett Packard on synchronizing time in networks – the idea of timing and control derived from smart sensor interfaces, and initiated and guided the development of a precision time synchronization standard IEEE 1588 to support a wide variety of applications. Lee went on to organize the first International IEEE Symposium on Precision Clock Synchronization for Measurement, Control, and Communications (ISPCS), and introduced its first Plugfest, which is a way for manufacturers of 1588-based devices and networks to get together to perform interoperability testing for standards conformance. Due to the popularity of the 1588 standard, the industry refers to it simply as the Precision Time Protocol (PTP). After two decades of effort and two revisions of the IEEE 1588 standard, PTP has achieved a time precision of better than 100 picoseconds, a ten thousandfold improvement from 1 microsecond based on the first version of the standard. Lee was also one of 29 innovators worldwide profiled by the EE Times’ Great Minds, Great Ideas Project (2006) in which he was recognized for paving the road to ubiquitous computing (a concept now known as the Internet of Things).
In reflecting on his lifetime achievement award, Kang Lee identified his recommended path to success: once you have come up with a good idea, then you should develop a clear plan, set achievable goals, build a strong team, effectively promote the idea, and face the challenge pursuing it with hard work and consistency and a willingness to adapt and change. Lee also expressed gratitude for NBS and NIST management for providing opportunities and support throughout his entire federal career.
