Arun Netravali
Bell Labs President
Dr. Arun Netravali, President (Emeritus) of Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies Inc, is in the process of setting up a $250- million venture capital fund to invest in the US-based start-up companies in telecom and technology areas, which would be outsourcing to India.
“We will invest in the start-up companies and help them succeed, by helping the management, cutting overhead cost by outsourcing. Part of the $250-million has already come in,” he told press persons after delivering a lecture on ‘Communication Networking’ : Beyond 2005,’ organized by CII. He refused to divulge the size of investments, but said the fund would pick minority stakes in these companies.
“We want to bring outsourcing which has mostly been handled for large and medium sized companies to the world of start-ups in the technology and telecom areas. Start-ups have been concerned about bringing outsourcing and it is a valid concern because in the start-up world, things change all the time. So our goal is to figure out how to facilitate outsourcing by telling people to understand the value of it and reducing the fear that the start-ups may have in terms of outsourcing and reducing the overheads,” Dr. Netravali said Earlier delivering the lecture, he said that the present day Internet is likely to transform to a broadband “Hi-IQ Net” – with active Web sites and software agents to extract desired information via text, voice, images and video.
Dr. Netravali in his predications for the new millennium said that consumers and business would have a vast veriety of individualized custom services – written by countless programmes on an open network. He added that communication network would be tailor-made to suit the needs of individuals.
He added that a growing number of network appliances will collaborate with the Hi-IQ Net offer services that will enable us to interact as we do with our friends, with the knowledge and context of a close relationship using all our senses.
Dr. Netravali said that the new network act as a mediator to bring together information of all kinds.
He said that the challenger for service providers and cellular equipment makers was to ensure that the systems they produce was as inexpensive as possible and also customize the data applications to suit specific users.
Arun Netravali is an international scientist of Indian origin. He has made many fundamental contributions in the areas of digital communications technology. Presently Dr. Arun Netravali is the President of the Bell Labs. Earlier he was Executive Vice President of research, responsible for Bell Labs’ basic research efforts in all areas involving communication, computing and physical sciences.
Dr. Arun Netravali has played an important role in making the Bell Labs the leader in telecommunications technology. Dr. Netravali’s pioneering contributions in algorithms for the representation, synthesis, processing, and compression of images and image sequences has transformed television from analog to digital in broadcast TV, cable TV, DBS, HDTV, and enable an entirely new set of products and services for the multimedia revolution over the Internet.
Dr. Netravali graduated from the IIT, Mumbai, India. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees from Rice University in Houston, Taxes, in the field of electrical engineering. Dr. Arun C. Netravali was also an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught graduate courses at City College (N.Y.), Columbia University and Rutgers University. He serves on the board of a number of organizations. He is a member of the Indo/U.S. Science and Technology Council, initiated by the former President Clinton and the then Indian PM, Mr. Vajpayee, and the NRI Advisory Committee for Telecommunications.
Dr. Netravali is a member of Tau Beta Phi and Sigma Xi, a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and AAAS and a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering. For his scientific achievements, he has received numerous awards, including the Alexander Graham Bell Medal (1991) an EMMY for the HDTV Grand Alliance (1994), the Computers & Communications Prize, (1997) (NEC, Japan), the Frederik Philips Award from the IEEE (2000), the NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies in India) Medal (2000), and the Kilby Medal from the IEEE (2001).
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