Marian Croak

Marian Croak
Croak in 2017
Born	May 14, 1955
Alma mater	Princeton University University of Southern California
Employer(s)	Google AT&T Bell Labs
Known for	Voice over IP

Dr. Marian Rogers Croak is an acclaimed American engineer who utterly transformed the capabilities of internet communication. Currently the Vice President of Engineering at Google, Croak's claim to fame was her revolutionary patent concerning Voice Over Internet Protocols (VoIP). This technology allows a person to make calls through Internet connection rather than a typical phone line, facilitating flexible and faster long distance communication globally. Prior to Google, Dr. Croak worked at AT&T (formerly Bell Labs) and filed over 200 patents under her name. The prolific innovation of Dr. Croak shows her dedication to “reducing the barrier of entry to quality, affordable communication for the masses”. In 2022, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her work with VoIP. She stated, "Many people think inventors have to be brilliant and off the charts in terms of their IQ, super smart and super academic in school and have gotten all A's, and that's not at all true. Inventors are usually people like you. Sometimes they're good at certain things, other times they're not, and that's ok. Just focus on what you want to change and you become that change and can make that change happen."

Early life and education

Born May 14, 1955, Dr. Croak was raised in New York City. She credits her lifelong interest in technology to her father. While he did not have formal education beyond elementary school, he built her a chemistry set that set into motion an early exploration of the sciences. Croak grew up entranced by the inner workings of plumbing, electricity, and other home-related maintenance. Her career is defined by the desire to fix broken systems, just like the technicians she viewed as a child. After high school, she went on to Princeton University for her undergraduate degree, graduating in 1997. She later obtained a doctorate from the University of Southern California in Social Psychology and Quantitative Analysis. Her education pointed her to the direction of Bell Labs, now known as AT&T, where she worked for three decades.

Career

She started off in Bell's Human Factors division, with the specific purpose of studying how technology could be used to positively impact human's lives. Croak first began working on digital messaging applications, tasked with the study of determining if various messaging applications could communicate with each other. This kind of research was very novel, as the earliest form of the Internet would not come to full fruition until the next year in 1983. Bell Labs wanted to send voice, text, and video data digitally rather than using a standard phone line. And the favored mechanism for this was Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) protocol, but Croak, along with the rest of her team, convinced AT&T to use TCP/IP instead. TCP/IP allowed for a standardized way of packaging and communicating information.

"Marian Rogers Croak Inventor Collectible Card". from the United States Patent and Trademark Office

Back of Collectible Card

While at AT&T, Croak and her team contemplated the potential of digital telecommunications. She worked on advancing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies, converting voice data into digital signals that can be easily transmitted over the internet rather than using traditional phone lines. Her work has furthered the capabilities of audio and video conferencing.  

During her time at AT&T she patented the technology that allowed cellphone users to donate money to organizations using text messaging. She developed this technology during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it revolutionized how people donate to charitable organizations when a natural disaster occurs. She received the 2013 Thomas Edison Patent Award for this technology. She was inspired to do this after seeing AT&T develop technology that helped American Idol set up a voting system that relied on text messages rather than voice calls, in 2003. The technology that she created with co-inventor Hossein Eslambolchi, was not finalized until October 2005, a couple of months after Hurricane Katrina. But through this technology after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, more than $43 million in donations were collected by relief organizations through donations by text message.

Before leaving AT&T she held the title of Senior Vice President of Applications and Services Infrastructure. At AT&T she managed over 2,000 engineers and computer scientists responsible for over 500 programs impacting AT&T's enterprise and consumer wireline and mobility services. Her responsibilities ranged from product realization and service planning to development and testing.

Croak joined Google in 2014, as a Vice President in the engineering group. At Google, she is responsible for expanding what the Internet is capable of doing around the world and increasing access to the Internet in the developing World. She created a new center of expertise on Responsible AI focusing on ethical development of AI within Google Research. Croak also works on racial justice efforts at Google and continues her goal of encouraging women and young girls in engineering.

Croak was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF), the National Academy of Engineers, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. Because of this, she became one of the first two black women to be inducted to the NIHF, joining the ranks of 48 other female inductees and 30 other Black inductees.

Patents

Croak has been awarded over 200 patents, almost half of which are in VoIP. Many of her inventions lay the foundations for the digital networks we know and use today. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022 for her patent VoIP Technology U.S. Patent No. 7,599,359 Method and apparatus for monitoring end-to-end performance in a network. Today, the widespread use of VoIP technology is vital for remote work and conferencing, as well as personal communications. Over the years, VoIP as technology has continued to evolve. The International VoIP calls market is predicted to hold the significant share of all conversations by 2025. VoIP had an estimated market size of $30 Billion in 2020 and is projected to grow to $95 Billion by 2027.

She received a patent in 2005 for text-based donations to charity, along with co-inventor Hossein Eslambolchi, U.S. Patent 7,715,368 Method and Apparatus for dynamically debiting a donation. This technology enables a network to identify a particular charity, provide the designating funding to the charity, and then have the network service provider bill the original donor on its monthly bill.

Personal life

Croak won the Edison Patent Awards in 2013 and 2014. She is currently a member of the Corporate Advisory Board for the Viterbi School of Engineering at her alma mater, the University of Southern California. Croak is also a former board member for such organizations as the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions; Catalyst; the Holocaust and Human Rights Museum (New Jersey); and the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. She has three grown children.

Impact and Legacy

The scope of Dr. Croak's legacy has impacted society more than is acknowledged. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted our dependence on technology as a means of basic function during extreme crises. Audio and video conferencing directly results from Croak's invention of VoIP. Without having such an innovation, millions of businesses would have been put at a standstill during forced quarantine. Even now, the impact of internet conferencing can be seen in modern education and work environments. Hybrid and remote options for learning and work are used much more frequently. Human efficiency is no longer slowed by issues of distance with the extended power of the internet. Trends for VoIP are also changing. The current break of AI in the technology industry has influenced new development in VoIP, along with greater cybersecurity measures, and a sustainability focus in Cloud Computing. In her current position at Google, Dr. Croak continues her exploration of expanding internet capabilities. Her work lies in finding ways to increase Internet access in the developing world.