Dr. Marian Croak
Oct. 22nd, 2020 12:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ndrosenWednesday afternoon, I saw and listened to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director Andrei Iancu’s interview with Marian Croak, formerly of AT&T, and now VP of Engineering at Google, and holder of over 200 patents. As a black woman, she’s not exactly typical of people with resumes like this. She spoke a bit about her work with VOIP, voice over Internet protocol, and how she made the idea more workable.
She used to watch American Idol for professional purposes, since the show used AT&T’s network, which could be overburdened by large numbers of votes. One solution was for people to use SMS texting to vote. Then came Hurricane Katrina, and using text to donate; since people already had financial arrangements with their providers, they could send texts to have money conveyed to the nonprofits that were helping.
She talked about how she had wanted to be an inventor from early childhood, and was impressed by people who could fix things. She also spoke of inspiration from people (real or fictional) who had endured extraordinary difficulties.
She used to watch American Idol for professional purposes, since the show used AT&T’s network, which could be overburdened by large numbers of votes. One solution was for people to use SMS texting to vote. Then came Hurricane Katrina, and using text to donate; since people already had financial arrangements with their providers, they could send texts to have money conveyed to the nonprofits that were helping.
She talked about how she had wanted to be an inventor from early childhood, and was impressed by people who could fix things. She also spoke of inspiration from people (real or fictional) who had endured extraordinary difficulties.
