Marian Croak: Technologist and Inventor
“I’ve always been motivated to change the world,” Marian Croak says when she speaks about her career as an inventor, computer scientist and technologist.
In fact, her research has revolutionized modern communication. Long before anyone else, she saw the power and potential of VoIP, a technology that converts voice into a digital signal that can be transmitted over the internet on any device. VoIP is the foundation that led to Zoom, Skype, Cisco Webex and any number of similar apps that are indispensable parts of our society.
Croak’s passion for innovation comes from a natural curiosity she had as a child and never lost.
She was born in New York City on May 14, 1955, into a family of modest means. Her childhood curiosity about how things worked went into overdrive whenever things around the house broke. When a plumber, carpenter or electrician arrived, Croak would look over his shoulder as he worked. She was fascinated by the inner workings of a sink, how many wires were inside a light fixture, or how the parts in a washing machine worked.. At one point, she was so enthralled by fixing things that she thought she would grow up to be a plumber.
Croak attended Catholic school until 10th grade when she transferred to a local public school. There, she found teachers who ignited her excitement in math and science.
“The teachers were just phenomenal,” she recalled. “I remember having a chemistry teacher who was a woman and she just inspired me so much.” Her father encouraged her passion for science by building her a chemistry set so she could conduct experiments at home.
After completing her undergraduate education at Princeton, Croak attended the University of Southern California. In 1982, with her doctorate in quantitative analysis and social psychology in hand, she was recruited to work at Bell Labs, a leading technology innovator of its time and the grandfather of today’s AT&T.
The timing of the start of her career couldn’t have more perfect. She was working at Bell’s Human Factor department at the dawn of the internet age. One of her early assignments was to study digital messaging apps, programs that were way ahead of the time and required out of the box thinking.
Often the only woman and person of color in the male dominated labs and rooms at Bell, Croak, who is soft-spoken and slight, could have been easily intimidated. But she wasn’t.
In the early 1990s, when the company was looking to replace its legacy hardwire phone lines, Bell wanted to use a communications standard known as Asynchronous Transfer Mode or ATM. The alternative was next generation technology called Internet Protocol or IP, but it would require a bigger investment in new infrastructure and there would be learning curves and risks that come with any new technology.
“I thought we were about to make a mistake by not moving to Internet Protocol,” she said in a 2014 interview. “I realized I had to advocate – loudly! - for that technology if AT&T was going to maintain its leadership position. The key was to find a few coworkers who shared my conviction…our voices were able to win over others to our point of view.”
Out that conviction, VoIP was born. It has made remote conferencing standard business practice and relying on landlines for anywhere calling obsolete. While Croak spent a large part of her 32-year career at AT&T on VoIP development, it wasn’t her only impact on our culture.
She even had a role in building the popularity of the television show American Idol. During the show’s first season in 2002, viewers would vote for their favorite contestants by phone. A year later, thanks to Croak, fans could text their votes, even though most of us didn’t use text to communicate. According to a poll conducted by AT&T, almost a quarter of the people who responded to the survey said they learned how to text using the “text to vote” app.
Three years later, in August 2005, the text app became a humanitarian tool when Hurricane Katrina wiped out homes and businesses in New Orleans. AT&T released a text to donate app that brought in $130,000. Five years later, when a magnitude seven earthquake decimated Haiti, that same app raised $32 million in relief funds. Donors simply texted the word “Haiti.” The campaign set the pace for impulse donations and created a new fundraising method. Both were the brainchild of Croak and her co-creator Hossein Eslambochi. For their invention, they won the Edison Award that year.
In 2014 Croak embarked on a new chapter in her career by joining Google. There, she has helped bring broadband to developing areas of Africa and Asia. As a vice president of engineering, she leads the company’s Research Center for Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology, where her skill set of STEM and humanism will be more valuable than ever.
The holder of more than 200 patents, Croak was inducted into the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame in 2022 for her patent on VoIP.
© 2023 Alice Look
Executive Producer
Remarkable Women Project