Marian Croak
Marian Rogers Croak is a Vice President of Engineering at Google. She has previously served as Senior Vice President of Research and Development at ATT Labs. She is credited as a developer of Voice over IP creating most of methods and features that both improved its reliability and ushered in its nearly universal adoption.
Marian Croak | |
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in 2017 | |
Alma mater | Princeton University University of Southern California |
Employer | Google AT&T Bell Labs |
Known for | Voice over IP |
Education and early career
Croak grew up in New York City.[1] She attended Princeton University and completed her doctoral studies at the University of Southern California in 1982, specialising in social psychology and quantitative analysis.[2][3]
Career
She joined AT&T at Bell Labs in 1982.[4] She advocated for switching from wired phone technology to internet protocol.[2][5][6] She holds over two hundred patents, including over one hundred in relation to Voice over IP.[7] She pioneered the use of phone network services to make it easy for the public to donate to crisis appeals.[8][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 over 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.[2][23] She led Google's service expansion into emerging markets, including managing the team who 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.
References
- Google Developers (2017-06-16), Women Techmakers Mountain View Summit 2017: Keynote, retrieved 2018-10-22
- "[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.
- Princeton Alumni Weekly. princeton alumni weekly. 1992.
- Interactive, Arc. "Her Story of the Internet | Arc Interactive". Arc Interactive. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "Meet Marian Croak, the African-American Woman Who Created VOIP". Temmy Balogun. 2018-06-14. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "Marian Croak Went From Soft-Spoken Employee To SVP At AT&T With 156 Patents". MadameNoire. 2014-04-01. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "Search Patents - Justia Patents Search". patents.justia.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "Marian Croak Went From Soft-Spoken Employee To SVP At AT&T With 156 Patents". MadameNoire. 2014-04-01. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- Brush, Candida. "Are You A Corporate Entrepreneur?". Forbes. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "The Surprising Link Between "American Idol" And Text-To-Donate Fundraising". Fast Company. 2013-10-01. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "AT&T Wireless and Corporation". go.skimresources.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- illumination, Duke Energy |. "Meet 5 remarkable heroes of science and technology". Duke Energy | illumination. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- Strom, Stephanie. "A Deluge of Donations via Text Messages". Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "Marian R. Croak - Savoy Network". savoynetwork.com. 2012-10-16. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- 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.
- Croak, Marian (2012-08-23). "Dear Young Women in Technology, Welcome From a 30-year Veteran". Huffington Post. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "African American Inventors Who Left Their Mark in History". Strategic Systems. 2018-02-12. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "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.
- "ATIS Board of Directors Elects Sprint's Stephen Bye and AT&T's Marian Croak". www.atis.org. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "Marian Croak Honored at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards | AT&T". about.att.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- Inc., Career Communications Group. "Career Communications Group Announces 2014 Black Engineer Of The Year Award Recipients". PRLog. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- Hoffman, Andrea (2015-08-13), AT&T Pays Tribute to 2014 Culture Shift Labs Awards Brunch Honoree Marian Croak, retrieved 2018-10-22
- "AT&T Labs SVP Croak retires, Fuetsch takes over Domain 2.0 initiative | FierceTelecom". www.fiercetelecom.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "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.
- "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. 2015-12-16. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
- "Leadership Chhange: The Center for Holocaust, Human Rights & Genocide Education". www.chhange.org. Retrieved 2018-10-22.