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Marta Karczewicz

Vice President of Technology

Qualcomm

POSITION

Vice President of Technology

COMPANY

Qualcomm

COUNTRY

Poland

SCENE

Technology

SOCIAL

LinkedIn

Facebook

Twitter

What makes Marta Karczewicz a Global Shaker?

Dr. Marta Karczewicz is Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm, a US-based telecommunications company.

It’s here that she’s had the space to work on inventions that have completely rewritten how we do everything from watch TV to speak to our loved ones.

Her hundreds of patents have enabled the compression of a video by a factor of 1,000 without affecting the quality of the final image. This is used on the one billion hours of YouTube videos watched every day, and by doctors that use teleconference technology to provide medical care remotely.

In other words, she’s the reason devices as small as mobiles are able to download and play high quality videos within seconds.

“Every time a video is streamed on an online service or broadcast over a high-definition television signal, it is likely encoded using video standards that I helped develop,” she says in an interview with Qualcomm.

“One of the most common use cases for my inventions is that they enable the quality of video livestreaming that impact general multimedia entertainment like Netflix or YouTube, but it also goes way beyond that.

“My inventions have helped enable 8K x 4K video resolutions at 120 frames per second, which is what allows users to use virtual and augmented reality applications on mobile devices.”

In 2019, Karczewicz was a runner up for the European Patent Office’s European Investor Award, in the lifetime achievement category. Previous winners invented laser eye surgery; the world’s first LCD flat panel display; and vaccines against whooping cough and meningitis.

Before Qualcomm, she studied signal and image processing at Tampere University in Finland, then spent 10 years at Nokia.

Her advice for aspiring young inventors? “Keep in mind that sometimes it is good to be naive,” she concludes to Qualcomm.

Tags: AR, netflix, Streaming, telemedicine, VR, YouTube

Last updated: February 14, 2020