Otto J. M. Smith was an educator, inventor and author in the fields of engineering and electronics. He spent most of his career as a professor at University of California Berkeley. Dr. Smith is probably best known for the invention of the Smith predictor, a method of handling deadtime in feedback control systems: "A somewhat more complicated solution to the deadtime problem was proposed in 1957 by Otto Smith (see 'The Smith Predictor: A Process Engineer's Crystal Ball,' Control Engineering, May 1996). Mr. Smith demonstrated how a mathematical model of the process could be used to endow the controller with prescience to generate just the right control moves without waiting to see how each move turned out.