Ronjon Nag is a British-American inventor and entrepreneur specializing in the field of mobile technology. He co-founded the technology company Lexicus, acquired by Motorola in 1993 and Cellmania, acquired by Research in Motion in 2010. He later served as Vice-President of both Motorola and BlackBerry.

Education and personal life

Ronjon Nag received his bachelor's degree in 1984 from the University of Birmingham, where he studied Electronic & Electrical Engineering. He received a Master of Science degree from MIT in Management Science and studied neural networks in Stanford University's Department of Psychology. After completing a Doctorate in Engineering at Cambridge University, he studied as a Harkness Fellow in the United States at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. In 2014 became a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and in 2016, he become a fellow of the

Distinguished Careers Institute. He divides his time between Cambridge in the United Kingdom and Silicon Valley in California.

Career in Technology

Nag's work has focused on inventing new systems for interacting with mobile devices, resulting in breakthroughs in the application of speech recognition, handwriting recognition, predictive text and

touch screens A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is often ...

for mobile devices. As a student at Cambridge University, Nag wrote an article applying a hidden Markov model to speech recognition, which became the basis for his Phd on the subject. In 1991 Ronjon Nag began researching artificial neural networks, first under Amar Gupta at MIT and then in Stanford University's Department of Psychology, studying under

David Rumelhart David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artif ...

. In 1992, Nag co-founded the technology company Lexicus in Palo Alto, California. As CEO and as a computer scientist, Nag oversaw the emergence of Lexicus as an industry pioneer of speech and predictive technology systems and saw the acquisition of Lexicus by Motorola in November 1993. As a subsidiary of Motorola, Lexicus introduced some of the first devices with Chinese handwriting and speech recognition. In 1999, he founded Cellmania, a mobile infrastructure company that provided digital rights management for mobile content, enabling the creation of some of the first mobile app stores. Cellmania was sold to Research in Motion, now BlackBerry Limited, in 2010 for an undisclosed sum. Nag is President of th
R42 Institute
which develops and funds AI and Longevity projects. Nag is also Chairman of Bounce Imaging, which develops throwable cameras undertaking video stitching whilst being thrown, winning th
$1m Verizon Powerful Answers Prize in 2015

Awards

In 2014 Nag was the recipient of the

Mountbatten Medal The IET Mountbatten Medal is awarded annually for an outstanding contribution, or contributions over a period, to the promotion of electronics or information technology and their application. The Medal was established by the National Electronics C ...

awarded by the Institution of Engineering and Technology. The award cited Nag's influence on the creation of the modern mobile phone industry with the development of smartphone components such as text and speech recognition and digital distribution platforms, technologies that were later incorporated widely into early smartphones developed by Motorola and BlackBerry. In 2021, Nag's contributions in engineering entrepreneurship, smartphone user interfaces, and mobile app stores were acknowledged by th
IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section (SCV) with an Outstanding Engineer award

References I

External links

Institution of Engineering and Technology Award Winners
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nag, Ronjon Living people American people of British descent Electrical engineers American inventors Alumni of the University of Cambridge Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Fellows of the Institution of Engineering and Technology Year of birth missing (living people)