Marian Croak

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Marian Croak
The Next Three Billion- Marian Croak speaking.jpg
in 2017
Alma materPrinceton University
University of Southern California
EmployerGoogle
AT&T
Bell Labs
Known forVoice over IP

Marian Rogers Croak is a Vice President of Engineering at Google. She has previously served as Senior Vice President of Research and Development at AT&T, where she and her team worked on advancing voice over IP technologies, furthering the capabilities of audio and video conferencing.[1]

Education and early career[]

Croak grew up in New York City.[2] She attended Princeton University and completed her doctoral studies at the University of Southern California in 1982, specialising in social psychology and quantitative analysis.[3][4]

Career[]

She joined AT&T at Bell Labs in 1982.[5] She advocated for switching from wired phone technology to internet protocol.[3][6][7] She holds more than two hundred patents with Hossein Eslambolchi, including more than one hundred in relation to voice over IP.[8] She pioneered the use of phone network services to make it easy for the public to donate to crisis appeals.[7][9] When AT&T partnered with American Idol to use a text message voting system, 22% of viewers learned to text to take part in the show.[10][11] She filed the patent for text-based donations to charity in 2005.[10] This capability revolutionised how people can donate money to charitable organisations:[12] for example, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake at least $22 million was pledged in this fashion.[13] She led the Domain 2.0 Architecture and managed more than 2,000 engineers.[14][15]

In 2012, Croak wrote a letter to young women in technology in the Huffington Post.[16] She was inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame in 2013.[17][18] She was elected as Vice Chair of ATIS, a technology development organisation.[19] She was honoured for “Outstanding Technical Contribution – Industry” at the 28th annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Conference in Washington, D.C. in 2014.[20][21] In the same year, she was listed in the Most Influential Women in Wireless list by FierceWireless. She was further honoured at Culture Shifting: A Weekend of Innovation in 2014.[22]

In 2014, she left AT&T to join Google, where she serves as a Vice President for Engineering.[3][23] She led Google's service expansion into emerging markets, including managing the team which developed the initial communications technology for Project Loon, which uses balloons to extend coverage.[24] She led the deployment of WiFi across India's railway system, dealing with extreme weather and high population density.[25] Since 2017, she has assumed responsibility for reliability engineering for many Google services. She serves on the board of directors of the Centre for Holocausts, Human Rights & Genocide Education.[26] and is a member of the Corporate Advisory Board of the University of Southern California. She is the mother of three adult children, two sons and a daughter.

In 2021, it was announced that she would be one of the first two black women (along with Patricia Bath) to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.[27]

References[]

  1. ^ "Marian Croak". www.invent.org. Retrieved 2021-10-30.
  2. ^ Google Developers (2017-06-16), Women Techmakers Mountain View Summit 2017: Keynote, retrieved 2018-10-22
  3. ^ a b c "[Women's History Month] Meet Marian Croak, inventor of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) networks - Face2Face Africa". Face2Face Africa. 2018-03-09. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  4. ^ Princeton Alumni Weekly. princeton alumni weekly. 1992.
  5. ^ Interactive, Arc. "Her Story of the Internet | Arc Interactive". Arc Interactive. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  6. ^ "Meet Marian Croak, the African-American Woman Who Created VOIP". Temmy Balogun. 2018-06-14. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  7. ^ a b Gedeon, Kimberly (2014-04-01). "Marian Croak Went From Soft-Spoken Employee To SVP At AT&T With 156 Patents". MadameNoire. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  8. ^ "Patent Database Search Results". patft.uspto.gov. Retrieved 2021-10-30.
  9. ^ Brush, Candida (2014-01-28). "Are You A Corporate Entrepreneur?". Forbes. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  10. ^ a b Kessler, Sarah (2013-10-01). "The Surprising Link Between 'American Idol' And Text-To-Donate Fundraising". Fast Company. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  11. ^ "AT&T Wireless and Corporation". go.skimresources.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  12. ^ Weinstein, Michael (2017-02-09). "Meet 5 remarkable heroes of science and technology". Duke Energy | illumination. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  13. ^ Strom, Stephanie (2010-01-18). "A Deluge of Donations via Text Messages". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  14. ^ "Marian R. Croak - Savoy Network". savoynetwork.com. 2012-10-16. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  15. ^ Larish, Bryan (2017). "SDN/NFV Futures: Moving Beyond Initial Deployments". Optical Fiber Communication Conference. Washington, D.C.: OSA. pp. W4J.1. doi:10.1364/ofc.2017.w4j.1. ISBN 9781943580231. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  16. ^ Croak, Marian (2012-08-23). "Dear Young Women in Technology, Welcome From a 30-year Veteran". Huffington Post. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  17. ^ "African American Inventors Who Left Their Mark in History". Strategic Systems. 2018-02-12. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  18. ^ "WITI - Women in Technology Hall of Fame - Marian R. Croak, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Applications & Services Infrastructure, AT&T Labs". www.witi.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  19. ^ "ATIS Board of Directors Elects Sprint's Stephen Bye and AT&T's Marian Croak". www.atis.org. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  20. ^ "Marian Croak Honored at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards | AT&T". about.att.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  21. ^ Inc., Career Communications Group (2014-01-02). "Career Communications Group Announces 2014 Black Engineer Of The Year Award Recipients". PRLog. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  22. ^ Hoffman, Andrea (2015-08-13), AT&T Pays Tribute to 2014 Culture Shift Labs Awards Brunch Honoree Marian Croak, retrieved 2018-10-22
  23. ^ Marek, Sue (2014-11-11). "AT&T Labs SVP Croak retires, Fuetsch takes over Domain 2.0 initiative | FierceTelecom". www.fiercetelecom.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  24. ^ "The New Mothers of Technology: 6 Women Who Have Led in Tech Since 2010". Technology Solutions That Drive Business. 2017-05-12. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  25. ^ Gilbert, David (2015-12-16). "Google CEO Sundar Pichai Outlines Plan To Capture Indian Market With Free Wi-Fi, Recruitment And Faster Access -- But Not Android One". International Business Times. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  26. ^ "Leadership Chhange: The Center for Holocaust, Human Rights & Genocide Education". www.chhange.org. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  27. ^ Treisman, Rachel (2021-09-27). "Meet The First 2 Black Women To Be Inducted Into The National Inventors Hall Of Fame". NPR. Retrieved 2021-09-28.
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