Videocalls and streams are common thanks to Polish woman inventor
These days everybody is accustomed to online meetings and all kinds of streaming, like digital television or video-on-demand. Yet, probably nobody knows that we owe today’s perfect quality of online vision to a Polish scientist DR. MARTA KARCZEWICZ, holder of over 700 patents (including 500 in US) concerning mostly video compression and altogether worth over USD 1 billion.
This “billionaire” revolutionizing vision technology of the 21st century ranks No. 1 among world women inventors. Her technology powers most of online video-conferencing platforms.
She was born in Poland in 1970. Her mother was a physician, father a mechanical engineer. Already at school she won a prestigious Polish math competition, the so-called Math Olympics. She started her career at Nokia and in 2006 joined Qualcomm.
Now she is Qualcomm's vice president for technology leading a team of 30 people dedicated to multimedia R&D, including remote education, telemedicine and machine-to-machine communication. They develop codecs, code pieces that compress or decompress video up to 1,000 times and are at the core of everyday tech devices.
Marta was one of three recipients of the Qualcomm IP excellence Award in 2012 and was nominated as one of three finalists for the 2019 European Inventor Award in the prestigious “Lifetime Achievement” category.
She says that while growing up in Poland the interest in mathematics and science was quite evenly split between boys and girls. Yet, while working in today’s technology she is often the?only woman in the room. Thanks to this “only woman” from Poland videocalls are now as common as street payphones a generation ago.?