Herbert Freeman graduated from Union back in 1947, but he has never stopped learning. And that's how he has stayed near the top of the computer engineering field for close to half a century.
“A professor's life is one of continuous learning,” says the sixty-nine-year-old former director of the Center
for Computer Aids for Industrial Productivity at Rutgers University, where he still teaches and directs graduate research.
“In high school and college I received a good education and learned how to learn,” he explains. “And it's a good thing I did. The work I do today bears almost no relationship to my work fifteen years ago and has nothing to do with what I was doing thirty years ago.”
Well, that may not be exactly true. After all, since the early fifties, he has been working with computers. That's when he designed the first computer for the Sperry Corporation. The computer was six feet tall, ten feet wide, and far slower than even the bottom-of-the-line personal computers of today. Still, it was a computer.
Freeman began his career at Sperry after earning his master's in electrical engineering from
Columbia University. There, he worked with what were then called
“servomechanisms” machines that could steer a ship automatically or control anti-aircraft guns. It was a task that prepared him for his
job in Sperry's guided missile division. A year later, however, his boss steered him towards a new technology-digital computers-and before he knew it, Freeman was designing the SPEEDAC, the first Sperry digital computer.
“Unfortunately-and it's a sad commentary on humanity-most of the advances in science and technology were motivated by military considerations,” Freeman says. “Ninety-five percent of our work at Sperry was for the military.”
These days Freeman has found a new niche. He is on the cutting edge of computer imaging, teaching computers both to generate pictures and to interpret images. His immediate work involves developing new technology for producing maps with computers in ways that are much faster and yield maps that are more
accurate than those drawn by cartographers.
The technology is already being applied by the Department of Agriculture, which produces hundreds of maps every year detailing forest, slope, and soil characteristics throughout the country.
As for teaching a computer to interpret an image, Freeman says banks are clamoring
for this technology so computers can recognize the handwritten numbers on personal checks. According to Freeman, the Internal Revenue Service is also interested in computers that will be able to read the millions of tax returns it receives every year.
The changes brought about by the computer revolution may seem dramatic, says Freeman, but on the grand scale of scientific advancement throughout history, the invention of the steam engine more than two centuries ago and other advances we now take for granted were perhaps even more monumental.
“The computer has revolutionized civilization,” he explains, “but imagine what it must have been like to live at the time of the invention of the mechanical clock or when the spear was replaced by the bullet.”
Freeman decided at the age of five that he wanted to be an electrical engineer. He says he remembers fixing his mother's kitchen appliances and utensils as a small boy in Germany and admiring a grandfather who was a watchmaker and several uncles who were
“technically oriented.”
“If they had been a generation later, they would have been engineers,” he says.
Fittingly, his life was also touched by perhaps the greatest scientist of the twentieth century-Albert Einstein. Freeman's parents
had emigrated from Germany in 1936 but for some complex reasons, he (aged ten) had been left behind. Obtaining a visa for him dragged on for almost two years and drew the attention of a number of prominent people who tried to help reunite the family. The matter finally came to the attention of Einstein, who wrote a series of letters to the State Department to break the bureaucratic stalemate. A few months later Freeman arrived in America and moved with his family to Waterford, N.Y., just north of Albany.
Today, Freeman lives with his wife
of forty years, Joan, in Cranbury, N.J. They have three children and four grandchildren.
When he isn't preparing for a lecture or working on his research projects, he's telling his students to prepare for the only thing that can be
predicted change.
“I tell my students I have no idea what technology will be like in fifteen years, and anybody who says he does, doesn't know what he is taking about. All I
know is that the technology will be different from what it is today, and most of the predictions will turn out to be wrong.”
Coming from a man who remembers when most computer scientists never dreamed that people would someday own personal computers, this is
the one technological prediction that might turn out to be true.