The US-based Marconi Society, dedicated to furthering scientific achievements in communications and related technologies, has announced that it will present the 2017 Marconi Prize to Arun Netravali. The prize includes a cash component of $100,000 and will be given at the awards ceremony which will take place in Summit, New Jersey on October 3.

Netravali, former President of Bell Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs), has pioneered work on video compression standards that served as the key base technology for MPEG 1, 2 and 4 that enabled a wide range of video services including digital TV, HDTV and streaming video, ushering in a digital video revolution.

MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) is an international standard for encoding and compressing video images, which is used in most TV sets and mobile phones today. Netravali has also served the Indian government on the global board of advisers for its telecom initiative.

“Bell Labs cultivated the brightest minds across science and engineering disciplines. It is this diversity that really enables large-scale system development. Regardless of one’s role, we knew that the fundamental mission was excellence in communications,” said Netravali.

He created a single, interdisciplinary team to develop HDTV and MPEG — a new type of organisation where researchers and developers sat side-by-side to deliver new technologies quickly to market.

Pointing out that few things have had greater impact on communications in recent years than the digital video revolution led by Arun, Vint Cerf, Chairman, Marconi Society and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, said “Everywhere you look, video is transforming the way we communicate on mobile devices and how we consume entertainment and news. The next generation of video based on this technology, including virtual reality, promises to revolutionize video consumption, delivery and business models once again.”

Born on May 26, 1946 in Ankola in Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, Netravali grew up in Matunga, Mumbai. He studied at King George High School and later at Elphinstone College before joining IIT Bombay, where he graduated with a BTech in Electrical Engineering in 1967. He went to the US in 1968 for his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering at Rice University, Houston and has lived in the US since.

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