Atal was born in India, and received his BS degree in
physics (1952) from the
University of Lucknow, a diploma in electrical communication engineering (1955) from the
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and a PhD in electrical engineering (1968) from
Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. From 1957 to 1960, he was a lecturer in
acoustics at the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In 1961 Atal joined
Bell Laboratories, where his subsequent research focused on
acoustics and
speech, making major contributions in the field of speech analysis, synthesis, and coding, including low bit-rate speech coding and automatic
speech recognition. He advanced and promoted
linear predictive coding (1967), and developed
code-excited linear prediction (1985) with
Manfred R. Schroeder. He retired in 2002 to become affiliate professor of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Washington. Atal holds more than 16 U.S. patents, and is a member of the
National Academy of Engineering and
National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the
Acoustical Society of America and of the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received the 1986
IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award "for pioneering contributions to linear predictive coding for speech processing", and the 1993 IEEE ASSP Society Award for contributions to linear prediction of speech, multipulse, and code-excited source coding. He is the
Franklin Institute's
2003 Benjamin Franklin Medal Laureate in Engineering. == Selected works ==