Arun N. Netravali was selected to receive the 2006 Vladimir Karapetoff Award, Eta Kappa Nu's
most prestigious award for career contributions, based on his technical contributions in the
FCC standards for HDTV and the motion picture industry MPEG standards. He is a founder and
managing partner of OmniCapital, a private equity firm based in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
Previously, he was the president of Bell Laboratories, where he was responsible for research and development across all of Lucent (with 22,000 people and an annual budget of $3.5 billion). He held a variety of management positions in AT&T and Lucent, covering R&D in computing and telecommunications.
During his tenure as president of Bell Labs, R&D productivity improved by 40 percent, the patent rate climbed to four patents a day, intellectual-property revenue went up significantly, 35 ventures were launched with Bell Labs technology, and many leading-edge products were introduced in wireless, optical and data communications.
Netravali is regarded as a pioneer in the field of digital technology and led numerous initiatives including Bell Labs' high-definition television (HDTV) effort. He has authored more than 180 technical papers and co-authored three books; he has been a keynote speaker at major industry forums. He holds more than 75 patents in the areas of computer networks, human-machine interfaces, picture processing, and digital television.
A Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, and New Jersey's Inventors Hall of Fame, Netravali is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He has received many awards, including the Alexander Graham Bell Medal (1991), an Emmy for the HDTV Grand Alliance (1994), the Computers & Communications Prize (NEC, Japan, 1997), the IEEE Frederik Philips Award (2000), the National Association of Software and Services Companies in India Medal (2000), the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal (2001), the Padma Bhusan Award from the President of India (2001), the Science and Technology Medal from the R&D Council of New Jersey (2001), and the National Medal of Technology (2001).
Netravali was an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught graduate courses at City College (New York), Columbia University, and Rutgers University. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals, and now serves on the Boards of Level 3 Communications and Agere Systems. He is an executive consultant to Accenture, LLP and was a trustee of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Netravali is also a member of the Indo/U.S. Science and Technology Council, and the NRI Advisory Committee for Telecommunications.
Netravali received the B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India, and the masterŐs and doctoral degrees from Rice University in Houston, Texas, all in electrical engineering.
