Lin-shan Lee received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1974, an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1975 and 1977, respectively. After working in California in the industry from 1977 to 1979 on communications technology in particular satellite communications, he became an associate professor of National Taiwan University in 1979, and has been a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the university since 1982. He was also a department head of the university from 1982 to 1987. He holds a joint appointment with the Institute of Information Science of Academia Sinica as a research fellow starting in 1985, and was the director of the institute from 1991 to 1997. He also served as the chair of the R&D Commission of National Taiwan University from 2002 to 2005. His research interests include various topics in digital communications such as digital transmission theory and signal processing for communications, as well as spoken language processing including speech recognition and transcription, text-to-speech synthesis, spoken dialogues, and spoken document understanding and retrieval.

He was the guest editor for the special issue on Intelligent Signal Processing in Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Dec. 94 and Jan. 95. He served in various positions of IEEE Communications Society, including regional chair for Asia Pacific (1994-1995), member of the Board of Governors (1994-1997), Vice President for International Affairs (1996-1997) and the Awards Committee chair (1998-1999). He was the general co-chair of IEEE Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications 1996 (PIMRC'96) at Taipei, and the Technical Program Chair of IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (Globecom) 2002 at Taipei.

He developed quite several earliest versions of Chinese spoken language systems in the world, including text-to-speech system (1984), natural language analyzer (1986), dictation systems(1991 and 1993 for isolated syllable input, 1995 for continuous speech input), spoken document retrieval system (1997), and spoken dialogue system (1998). He has been a member of the Permanent Council of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) since 1994, and was the Vice Chair of Technical Program Committee of the conference in year 2000 at Beijing. He was the convener of COCOSDA (International COordinating COmmittee for Speech Databases and Assessment) 2000-2001, and elected as a Board member of International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) since 2001.

He received about 11 patents, and authored about 65 papers in international journals and 190 papers in international conferences. He was elected IEEE Fellow in 1992 with citation, "For Contributions to Computer Voice Input/Output Techniques for Mandarin Chinese and Engineering Education". He is the recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Contributions in Electrical Engineering sponsored by the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineers at Taipei in 1991, the Award for Distinguished Academic Contributions in Engineering sponsored by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan, Republic of China in 1993, the Outstanding Scholar Award sponsored by the Foundation for the Advancement of Outstanding Scholarship at Taipei in 2002, and the National Chair Professorship of the country in 2004.