Everything that requires the transfer of a huge amount of data is associated with the work and discoveries of Marta Karczewicz. Billions of people use them every day. Billions, not millions. Impressive, right?
There are many people who haven't achieved anything special, yet they are on everyone's lips. There is also a second group, probably larger, although it's hard to estimate - those who are not known to the general public, but should be. The name Marta Karczewicz appeared in the media around 2019 when she was nominated for the prestigious European Inventor Award as one of the three finalists in the "Lifetime Achievement" category, for her work on video compression. Then we learned that we owe the ability to use Netflix, Teams or Zoom to this scientist born in Szczecin. Thanks to her achievements, we are able to send movies and data, as well as communicate via video calls with people in any location.
Everything that requires the transmission of a huge amount of data is linked to the work and discoveries of Marta Karczewicz. Billions of people use them every day. Billions, not millions. Impressive, isn't it?
Marta Karczewicz was born in 1970 in Szczecin, a city far from the epicenter of Polish events both then and unfortunately today. She grew up during the communist regime. Long-distance calls had to be ordered in advance, and then wait by the phone for the connection. Foreign travel was not available to ordinary bread eaters. Anyone who wanted to leave had to describe in detail the purpose of the trip and the return date, parents rarely could travel with children - joint departure increased the risk of desertion from the country. This was the reality in which the future scientist, the daughter of a doctor and an engineer, functioned. She attended the Adam Asnyk General Education High School, but apart from mathematics and physics, she did not find education attractive. The biggest problem was the need to memorize. Marta Karczewicz did not have the patience for this and still believes that she would not have been successful in any other profession, apart from the one she practices.
However, mathematics is a completely different discipline. All you need to do is think logically, that's really the only necessary skill. And this came easily to Karczewicz. In the 1988/1989 school year, she participated in the Polish Mathematical Olympiad and was among the 25 awarded - she received a distinction. This made it easier for her to get a place at university, and also attracted the attention of Nokia, which offered the talented student a foreign grant.
It's 1989, communism is falling, the iron curtain is lifting. One of the first people to take advantage of the freedom to travel and the opportunity to study in another country is young Marta. She starts her studies in her hometown, at the Szczecin University of Technology, but soon lands in Finland, at the University of Tampere. The grant from Nokia covers research in signal and image processing. Once there, the issue of data compression quickly absorbs Marta. Analyzing large amounts of data and looking for patterns always gave her pleasure. Just like watching action movies, preferably with spectacular special effects. She doesn't yet know how much cinema will owe her in the future.
She is currently finishing her studies and writing her PhD, but she is already professionally associated with the grant founder. After obtaining scientific qualifications, the mathematician goes overseas to Dallas, where she runs one of the research centers for Nokia. In 2006, after many years of satisfying cooperation for both sides, she joins the team of Qualcomm Inc, an American IT company specializing in wireless communication. Changing the company does not mean changing interests. Karczewicz continues her work in San Diego on the issue of compression, contributing to the development of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or Versatile Video Coding (VVC), enabling fast streaming on mobile devices.
One of the most important inventions of the Polish woman in the field of AVC is the deblocking filter patented by her, which has found application in television decoders. It smooths out pixels appearing along sharp contours as well as spots and halos in the image. AVC simplifies the image for transmission purposes, dividing it into simpler blocks of information. This not only reduces the file size, but also improves the contrast between adjacent blocks.
The compression process was perfectly and clearly described in the UPRP Quarterly by Zbigniew Biskupski: "A video image consists of 24 to 120 frames per second. In HD resolution, each of these frames consists of 1920 by 1080 pixels, or about two million points on the screen. Each pixel contains information about brightness and color. This creates a huge amount of raw data - second by second. Data compression is the art of reducing this huge amount of information - frame by frame. The means to achieve this goal is a codec. It is a set of modules and algorithms that perform this task on our end devices.
Codecs reduce image information to a minimum and convert them into zeros and ones. This data is then transmitted over telecommunications lines. At the destination, the codec reproduces the image based on limited information. The basic methods of data compression are based on the following principles. Color differences that our eyes do not perceive are omitted.
For example, in a video showing a walk on the beach, the sky and the beach remain unchanged. They do not need to be re-encoded frame by frame. Movements between reference frames are not precisely described, but only estimated in a way that saves data".
While the compression process itself may seem complicated, everyone can quickly notice the moments when it does not go properly. Marta Karczewicz developed a mechanism called the "correction loop" that prevents such disturbances. The mathematician is also the author of over 400 patent applications, the market value of which is estimated at over a billion dollars. 130 of these applications received European patents. This is a staggering number, also resulting from the fact that progress is not usually spectacular, each time these are improvements of the order of 1% - 2%. Karczewicz, perhaps due to her scientific background, believes in exchange:
– Companies must protect their copyright achievements, but they must also cooperate if they strive for progress – she claims. – When developing new codecs, we immediately make them available to international project groups. The goal is to inspire others and initiate new standardization projects. I am a great supporter of standardization, which is the best way to develop new technologies, as it promotes both cooperation and competition. We reveal our inventions so that others can further develop them and draw inspiration from them. When this happens, it is an even greater distinction for me – she emphasizes in a conversation with Zbigniew Biskupski.
In addition to Marta Karczewicz and Qualcomm, all key industry companies: Apple, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft or Sony worked on the new, better VVC. Joint efforts lead to a constant reduction in file sizes compared to HEVC. This is important because streaming accounts for 80% of all internet traffic.
Reducing the disk space occupied by data on the network is important not only for convenience of use. It is estimated that data servers generate almost twice the carbon footprint as air transport. So there is something to fight for.
A large part of the evolution of technology will be striving to make what we see better and better. The problem is achieving good effects with mass transmission and compression, so it's about making this "wow effect" from the initial demonstrations of new technologies also felt at home – the Pole predicted in 2019.
Since then, she does not appear in the media often. She is a person who values privacy. She manages a huge team in San Diego and it gives her great pleasure. She has the opportunity to conduct research, search, ask questions. She is not subjected to the pressure of immediate results at Qualcomm, which she greatly appreciates. In addition to discipline, a constant and integral part of her day is also time for relaxation, for leisurely car rides and visits to random restaurants. Solutions to complex problems often appear in the least expected situations.
If she ever gives an interview, it cannot lack a question about the position of women in the new technology industry. The woman from Szczecin assures that she has never experienced discrimination due to her gender and quickly climbed the career ladder, because the criterion for evaluation were her exceptional skills. However, she admits that each of the teams she has managed so far consisted of 90% men. In one of the interviews given to the American press, Marta Karczewicz said that in Poland she did not feel any disproportion between the number of male and female students interested in science. Despite this, in the Olympiad in which she won an award, she was the only woman among the laureates. It is worth writing about such scientists so that more women dare to pursue a career in the technology industry. We will all benefit from this.
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