Celebrating the Work of Marian Croak

I’d like to take some time to highlight Dr. Marian Croak, a pioneering tech leader who is currently a VP of Engineering at Google overseeing their artificial intelligence program and making sure it is developed responsibly.

I first learned about Dr. Croak in an article the Smithsonian Magazine published about texting right before the election. After attending New York City public schools, graduating from Princeton and later earning a PhD at USC, Dr. Croak took a role at AT&T where she was instrumental in advocating for switching wired phone technology to internet protocol.

Dr. Croak holds over 200 patents, and many of those are related to creating more reliable and scalable voice communication over the internet. But she didn’t stop there. While working at AT&T, Dr. Croak was responsible for their voice network, which American Idol relied on for voting during the first season. As the show exploded in popularity, Dr. Croak and her team watched in real time as their systems buckled under the pressure of the volume of calls from Idol voters. She decided to implement vote by SMS which streamlined the process for AT&T, and for voters.

A few years later, Dr. Croak was watching the fallout from Hurricane Katrina unfold on the news, and like many, was trying to figure out what she could do to help when the idea struck her - donating via SMS. The idea took off from there and changed the charitable giving landscape forever.

In her current role working on AI at Google, Dr. Croak utilizes both her technology background, but also her graduate studies in psychology. She described her approach to this work in a recent interview:

‍“My graduate studies were in both quantitative analysis and social psychology. I did my dissertation on looking at societal factors that influence inter-group bias as well as altruistic behavior. And so I’ve always approached engineering with that kind of mindset, looking at the impact of what we’re doing on users in general. [...] What I believe very, very strongly is that any technology that we’re designing should have a positive impact on society.”

Dr. Croak’s contributions have a clear intersection with our work here at GetThru, and have had a profound impact on society as a whole. She also recently discussed how racism has played a role in her career, which provides us a moment to reflect beyond her contributions to technology and focus our attention to the unique barriers women of color face in the workplace, and the ways we can continue to support opportunity and equity within the technology space. There are many organizations out there doing great work around diversity, equity and opportunity in tech, but a few you can consider supporting are:

• Black Girls Code
• digitalundivided
• /dev/color‍