Nikil Jayant

Nikil Jayant (1945 -- ) is a prominent communications engineer who was a long-term researcher at Bell Laboratories and subsequently a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1970.

Jayant's personal research has been in the field of digital coding, secure voice, and transmission of information signals. His research has been on techniques for speech encryption, packet voice, signal enhancement, robust vector quantization and image coding. He has made pioneering contributions to waveform quantization. He is the author of five books, and he has received 40 patents.

He won the 1995 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award. In 1996, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the coding and compression of speech, audio and image signals.