We’ve all heard about odd holidays that are celebrated – National Pizza Day, National Hat Day or even National Nothing Day. Today happens to be National Innovation Day. Rather than make light, we’d like to use this as an opportunity to acknowledge the people at AT&T who have contributed to how far we’ve come as a tech company.
From completing the first transcontinental telephone call 100 years ago to modernizing today’s software-based network, our people have contributed more than 12,000 patents to AT&T’s portfolio, making it one of the strongest patent portfolios in our industry. Today we are proud to celebrate a few of our many innovators:
- Alicia Abella, Assistant Vice President – Cloud Technologies & Services, leads her team in designing and creating cloud, mobile and services software solutions for AT&T’s cloud computing environment. Beyond her technical contributions, Alicia is an advocate for minorities and women in STEM careers.
- Randy Wohlert, Lead Member of Technical Staff, and Matt Austin, Senior Product Marketing Manager, utilized The Innovation Pipeline (TIP) at AT&T to develop Contax, a technology that gives users the ability to personalize and add context behind the people in their network.
- Oliver Spatscheck and Shubho Sen, Researchers at AT&T Labs, developed AT&T’s Application Resource Optimization (ARO) tool – designed to help app developers create more battery and data efficient apps.
- He Yan, Principal Inventive Scientist at AT&T Labs, contributed to our Service Quality Management program with his development of TONA – the Tower Outage and Network Analyzer – a technology that improves our customers’ network experience through data analytics.
- Craig Lee, Director of AT&T M2M Foundry, created Dashboard Messenger, an innovative and low-cost alternative to help reduce the use of cell phones while driving. The device sits on a driver’s dash and allows them to receive messages with a simple two-button “yes” or “no” interface without distracting the driver.
- Shelley Goldman, Lead Member of Technical Staff, is the latest female at AT&T to cross the 100-patent benchmark. Shelley has focused her career on developing virtual communications technology to make the lives of telecommuters easier.
Stay tuned over the next few months as we highlight more of the bright minds at AT&T who are making advances in technology that are rapidly changing the way we will live and work in the future.
