Indian-American Dr. Arun Netravali, who is the former president of Nokia Bell Labs, has been named the winner of the 2017 Marconi Prize. the Marconi Society announced June 15. The prize is awarded by the Marconi Foundation, which includes a $100,000 honorarium and a work of sculpture.
The Marconi Society cited Dr. Netravali’s work on video compression standards that served as the key base technology for MPEG 1, 2 and 4 and also enabled a wide range of video services, including digital TV, HDTV and streaming video, ushering in a digital video revolution. The technology is used in most TV sets and all mobile phones today.
The award ceremony will take place in, New Jersey on October 3, present by a symposium at Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill, on digital video and its societal impact.
The chairman of the Marconi Society and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, Dr. Vint Cerf said: “Few things have had a greater impact on communications in recent years than the digital video revolution led by Arun.
“Everywhere you look, a video is transforming the way we communicate on mobile devices and how we consume entertainment and news. Movies, YouTube, live streaming–it is literally transforming how people interact. The next generation of video based on this technology, including virtual reality, promises to revolutionize video consumption, delivery, and business models once again,” he said.
Dr. Netravalli came to the United States in 1967 and earned his Ph.D. from Rice University. The Indian-American researcher is the first to invent an iterative algorithm to estimate the motion of objects on a television screen. The cleverness of the algorithm is its real-time implementation.
Dr. Netravalli now holds 100 patents in the areas of computer networks, human interfaces to machines, picture processing, and digital television.
After retiring from Bell Labs, he became a founder and managing partner of OmniCapital, a private equity firm based in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
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