When the Marconi Society honored Arun Netravali, the ninth president of Bell Labs, with the Marconi Prize on October 3, 2017, it presented a unique opportunity to hear insight from two of today’s most respected technology innovators and thought leaders in the communications industry.
In their welcoming remarks at the Marconi Symposium, Nokia Bell Labs president Marcus Weldon and Vint Cerf, Vice President and Internet Evangelist at Google, praised Netravali, considered the father of digital video, and offered their personal reflections about him as a great innovator and leader.
They then stepped to the side and gave joint interviews, first as part of a videotaping scheduled with the Symposium, and then addressing a range of topics in an interview with Jeanne Gray, the publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today.
The historic anechoic chamber located on the Murray Hill New Jersey campus, adjoining the Symposium, was a fitting place for the occasion. The chamber, built in 1940, reflects in part the great research history of the Labs that includes eight Nobel Prize laureates. As the world’s oldest wedge-based anechoic chamber, the room uses fiberglass wedges to absorb echoes and reflections, and was once cited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s quietest room.
In the videotaping, Weldon and Cerf delved into the future of the connected world, drawing on their deep technology backgrounds. Weldon, now also the Corporate Chief Technology Officer of Nokia, was the CTO of the Broadband Solutions business unit of Lucent Technologies, which is focused on broadband economics and quality of service.
Cerf is widely viewed as one of the “fathers of the Internet” for his work on TCP/IP and internet architecture that helped establish the internet as a vehicle for instantaneous communication and collaboration.
Now Cerf and Weldon are part of today’s innovation body, addressing how the next billion will join the half of the world connected to the internet.
“The next billion will likely come from emerging economies such as India and Africa,” Weldon said.
To this, Cerf mused how to make that outreach successful.
“Part of answering this question is figuring out the cost,” Cerf said. “As costs come down, a larger percentage of people with expendable resources will have access.”
He added that mobile devices and smart phones are a proliferating avenue for internet access, and that in order for access to expand, the technology has to be developed even further.
Once people are on the internet, however, it must be useful, which is why Cerf said it’s essential to incentivize people to create content.
Weldon agreed, also noting that “the devices we use are as much creation devices as consumption devices.” This current day phenomenon builds on the foundation of Netravali’s research on digital technology at Bell Labs in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
One rapidly evolving area of technology, and an element that greatly excites both Weldon and Cerf, is artificial intelligence.
Cerf pointed out that as Internet connectivity expands, it’ll be reaching many who are illiterate. While almost everyone can speak, they may not be able to read or write, which is where AI can step in.
From voice interaction with the internet to on-the-go translation tools in foreign countries, Weldon foresees AI quickly becoming incredibly useful to a wide range of people.
“It’s also interesting from a societal standpoint,” Weldon said. “We want human interaction instead of looking at a graph that tracks our steps or sleep.” He sees research yielding important benefits to society that are often overlooked compared to commercial applications that are popularly embraced.
The challenge, then, will be finding ways to compress all the data needed for meaningful AI technology, since that will be increasingly necessary in low-data environments in the developing world.
“The next billion won’t walk around with 100 gigabytes of capacity,” Cerf said.
Moving to the center of the anechoic chamber, the two discussed what it takes to be a truly successful innovator in America.
In the context of Netravali’s award, the pair described the three critical roles the former president filled in order to have the lasting impact he did: innovator, entrepreneur and humanitarian.
The third is something that both Google and Nokia Bell Labs actively consider in their missions.
“The idea that inventions should be available for humankind is the leading philosophy of Bell Labs,” Weldon said.
Weldon further observed that while Bell Labs innovations have patents that make some money, the value to humanity far outweighs any profit.
For Google, open-source software such as Android and Chrome is a manifestation of that same idea, Cerf added.
In terms of American innovation, both agreed that the U.S. rewards innovation, exploration and risk-taking, but also faces challenges in the 21st century.
China, for example, is producing a significant number of engineers every year, as well as investing in scientific research and development. Meanwhile, according to the pair, the executive branch of the federal government is not establishing similar priorities.
“We have 330 million people here, and there are seven billion people in the world,” Cerf said. “If we were clever, we’d take in [the world’s smartest people], educate them, and try to keep them here.”
“Agreed, we have to continue to invest in breakthrough, disruptive research, and if it’s done in the right spirit of collaboration and connection, it’s also good for the rest of the world,” Weldon said.
Ultimately, both Weldon and Cerf concurred that the best innovators are able to think outside the norm while, most critically, mobilizing others with their passion. In their views, it is collaboration that separates the great innovators from others. They both saw that as a key part of Netravali’s legacy to Bell Labs which Weldon now takes forward.
“You can’t do anything of significant scale without being collaborative,” Cerf said. “Pick Elon Musk for example, or Steve Jobs. These are people who are highly creative and also able to get other people excited about what it is that they want to do.”
