ECE Professor Nikil Jayant was honored with an Indian Institute of Science Distinguished Alumnus Award in December. As India's premier campus for graduate studies and research in science and technology, IISc at Bangalore celebrated its 100th anniversary, with addresses by several world leaders, including three Nobel laureates. As part of the festivities, 16 of its alumni were named recipients of the IISc Distinguished Alumnus Award on December 12.

Dr. Jayant was cited for his illustrious research and leadership spanning four decades. He gave a guest talk entitled "Signal Compression: 1958-2008++," during which he recounted the fundamentals of the field, as well as its creation of life-changing applications such as the cell phone, MP3, digital camera, and HDTV on Demand, with significant new impact expected in fields as diverse as Television-Gaming Convergence, Multimedia Data Mining, and Medical Informatics.

A member of the ECE faculty since 1998, Dr. Jayant is the executive director for the Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology and the director of the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute. He holds the John Pippin Chair in Wireless Systems and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He specializes in telecommunications and computer engineering.