Professor William F. Schreiber was my Ph.D. thesis advisor. He passed away in October 2009 at the age of 84. This article in the Boston Globe describes a bit about his life. His remembrance ceremony was held at the MIT Faculty Club on November 21, 2009. The room was packed with people who came to celebrate his life. His family, friends, colleagues, and former students attended, many of us flying in from across the country.
I have the honor of being Professor Schreiber’s last Ph.D. student. I was invited to be one of the speakers at his remembrance. These are the words that I shared in memory of Professor Schreiber. Please feel free to share your Schreiber-isms and memories of Professor Schreiber below.
I had the privilege and fortune of being Professor Schreiber’s student, and I proudly carry the honor of being his last Ph.D. student. As soon as we graduated, while still in our caps and gowns, Professor Schreiber pulled us aside and said with a twinkle in his eye, “You can call me Bill!” So today I call him Bill, with full respect as my professor. Bill had a strong impact on me and my life. He formed who I am, both as a professional and as a person. Today I speak not only for myself, but for all of us who had the privilege of being taught by Bill.
I was lucky to have been taught by Bill at a unique time in his life. He had just retired at the age of 65. While the calendar hit 65, he was by no means “finished” with his work. I was looking for a summer job and this gave him the chance to do “a few more experiments”. I guess the results looked promising, because after that summer, he came out of retirement and took on me and Mike Polley as Ph.D. students to do “one last project” on high-definition television. He guided us in designing an HDTV system that was different from the mainstream HDTV proposals, which were also being designed by his former students. He wanted to design one last system that held the principles that he felt were important, even if it differed from the mainstream approaches. This is very typical of Bill- he was a man of principle and a man of integrity. He was not afraid to break convention when convention differed from his principles. In fact, this is when he did it most loudly.
One of my memories is the first time that he took me and Mike out to lunch. We went outside Bldg 36 and stood on Vassar Street, waiting for a chance to cross the street as many cars were speeding by in both directions. Mike and I were young and fit and we were standing on the street with our 65 year old professor. We were looking for a large break in traffic so that we would have plenty of space to safely walk him across the street. As we looked and waited, Professor Schreiber quickly darted across the street in a narrow space between rushing cars. Mike and I looked at each other, surprised! We shrugged our shoulders, and ran across the street trying to keep up with him.
This is how I remember Bill. He was bright, creative, energetic, and he darted through traffic. We worked very hard, but he worked harder, and we had to work hard to keep up with him. And this was during his retirement.
As I said, we worked with Bill at a unique time in his life. Since Bill was officially retired, he had a lot of time for me and Mike. And, since he had a full career’s worth of experience, he had a lot to reflect on and teach us. And, quite honestly, we had a lot to learn.
We had regular meetings where we discussed our research results. He always had great insights and guidance on the technology. Many of our research colleagues around the world were counting bits and measuring tenths of dBs. Bill taught us to do that, but he also taught us “how to look at pictures”. While he didn’t program computers, he could usually look at my experimental results and tell me where my bug was, for example, he’d say “I think there is something wrong with the motion vector search algorithm” or “did you look at the vertical high frequency components of the subband coder?” He was usually right.
Once we finished discussing our research, every meeting would inevitably turn into story time. Bill would tell us stories with a twinkle in his eye. He would tell us stories about happenings in the industry, stories about experiences from his past, and lessons he felt were important for us to learn. I always felt like he was trying to teach us everything he could to prepare us for the world.
Bill was unique and had so much character. He had unique and noteworthy perspectives on work and on life. I like to refer to his teachings and perspectives as Schreiber-isms.
Bill was a small man in physical size, but he was larger than life in the way he lived. He put the world’s problems on his shoulders and every day he worked to make the world a better place. In one Schreiberism he said: “HDTV is not about television, it’s about jobs.” And off he went, rallying industry and lobbying the government. He was right. He was concerned about world problems like unemployment. His daughter Tatiana said that Bill recently said “if unemployment was solved, almost all the world’s problems would go away.” He was concerned with these big issues through the last day of his life.
Bill did things in unconventional ways. He was in academia, where many professors train their students to be professors. But Bill felt it was important to train students to be engineers. Another Schreiberism: Bill said “MIT engineers should build bridges. Bridges fall down because the world’s smartest people are not building them.” He was concerned about America’s competitiveness in having quality engineering to build quality products, and he attributed that to how we taught our students. Bill strived to fix this problem with his teaching. He created his famous Imaging Systems course to teach people how to design and build imaging systems.
Bill advised me not to be an analyst, but to build things that add value to the world. That was Bill’s philosophy on life. Many of Bill’s former students, some of whom are in this room, are building the world’s most advanced imaging and video communication systems. We share Bill’s philosophy on life.
Bill always seeked out industrial sponsors for his students’ research, even when government research funding was abundant and easier to manage. He did this because he believed research should solve relevant industry problems. He believed that this was a way for students to learn about and address real problems and that this was a way for our research to have impact on the world.
Bill not only made contributions to industry, but he drove industry. Even in his retirement, Bill hosted industry meetings on HDTV. One time there was a furious debate about interlaced versus progressive scan. Mike and I were graduate students sitting in the audience taking notes. One industry person was making forceful statements that were just wrong. Being the honest graduate students that we were, Mike and I looked at each other, perplexed, and we whispered to each other “That’s wrong!” We told this to Bill later, and that’s when he gave us another Schreiber-ism: “If you don’t understand why someone is saying something, there is just one reason: Money”. Once again, he was right, and this was another good lesson for the working world.
Just a few years ago I went to Germany to accept an award for Bill. The European Broadcasting Union gave Bill an award for being the Father of Progressive HDTV. He was being recognized for the work that he did two decades earlier. This work was against convention at the time, and Bill, the professor, was moving the world’s largest electronics companies and government bodies.
Bill was always a decade ahead of his time. He could see the future and was not shy about expressing his thoughts. People who didn’t know him well might have considered him a trouble maker. But more often than not, time would tell that he was right. But then came the next Schreiber-ism: “Never say I told you so”. He told us that he learned that one from experience.
As such, Bill was not a man who cared about credit. He just cared about doing great work that would improve the world. He didn’t care about publications as much as he cared about building important things. He never cared about his own self-interest or his own position- he was always genuinely dedicated to finding the right answer and teaching others to do the same.
To Bill’s family, he spoke of you often and loved you very much. He loved his children and his grandchildren. He told a story of the ultimate test of his relationship with Marian- when he was trying to help her on the computer with the novel she was writing. She was looking over his shoulder… and he deleted it by mistake! He turned to Marian and said “I’m so sorry!” Marian was shocked, and stood patiently by his side. Neither uttered a bad word, and they later recovered the novel. Bill said if their relationship can survive that, they can survive anything.
Bill built the world’s greatest imaging systems throughout his career. He made it possible to print color on newspapers. He set up the first television center in academia in India. He developed high-quality picture scanners. He developed progressive high-definition television. He was as modern at the end of his career as he was at the beginning. Many people are still doing research with approaches that he pioneered decades ago.
I just passed my 40th birthday, and this made me reflect on another Schreiberism. Bill told me: “You get to do one big thing every 10 years of your career.” The week before Bill’s passing, I was sharing that wisdom with one of my colleagues.
Bill’s well-chosen stories taught me lifelong lessons that I continue to reflect on in my life and in my career. I regularly share these Schreiber-isms with those around me who I have the privilege to manage, mentor, and teach.
I am sad that Bill has passed. But I am also happy to celebrate his life, his accomplishments, and his impact on the world. So, please remember Bill as the man who darts across busy streets. The man who says, “HDTV is not about television, it’s about jobs.” “Solving unemployment would solve most of the world’s problems.” “MIT engineers should build bridges.” “You get to do one big thing every 10 years of your career.” And, “Never say I told you so.” He is the man who built a world-class imaging system every decade of his career. And, he is the teacher who taught his students to do the same.
While Professor Schreiber has passed, he strongly lives on in all of us. I see him in his former students. I see him in his family and friends. I see him in myself. And I see him in the people who we in turn touch with the Schreiberisms that he instilled in us.
Thank you, Bill, for living a life of principle and integrity, for caring about and solving important problems that are much bigger than yourself, and for doing it with a twinkle in your eye. And, thank you, Bill, for dedicating your life to teaching us to do the same.
Thank you for being a part of our lives. You have made each of us better people, and you have made the world a better place.
