Bayya Yegnanarayana did his BSc (1961) from Andhra University. He obtained the BE (1964) and ME (1966) degrees in Electrical Communication Engineering (ECE) from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. Thereafter, he worked in Faculty of ECE, IISc (1967-78) and obtained his PhD under the supervision of BS Ramakrishna. He was Visiting Associate Professor in Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University (1977-80), where he worked on speech recognition systems with D Raj Reddy. Thereafter, he had a brief stint at ISRO Bangalore, and then he joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras as Professor (1980), which he headed also (1985-89). After superannuation from IIT Madras (2006), he joined the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad as Professor and Microsoft Chair, where he is pursuing his research activity in speech processing. He served as Institute Professor at IIIT-H from 2012 to 2016. He is currently Professor Emeritus at BITS Pilani Hyderabad campus.

Academic and Research Achievements: At IISc, Yegnanarayana taught basic courses in acoustics, communication engineering and signal processing. His research interests cover: signal processing, speech, image processing and neural networks. He has demonstrated the significance of the so called 'leftovers' in speech processing, namely, the phase of the Fourier transform, the residual in the linear prediction analysis and suprasegmentals. The features of these leftover components are useful in many applications such as speech enhancement, speaker localization/tracking, besides in basic speech analysis. In early 1980s, he introduced graduate level courses on speech technology and artificial neural networks. He has published over 400 papers in these areas in IEEE and other international journals, and in the proceedings of national and international conferences. He has authored the book 'Artificial Neural Networks' (Prentice-Hall of India, 1999), which is used in many colleges as a basic textbook. He has supervised 30 PhD and 40 MS theses during his  years of career.

Other Contributions: Yegnanarayana designed and built the first anechoic sound chamber in India with indigenous materials at IISc while developing the test facilities in the Acoustics Laboratory. He established the speech and vision laboratory at IIT Madras, which is the leading laboratory in the country in this area. He also served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing (2003-06) and is currently  an Associate Editor for the Springer's international journal CIrcuits, Systems & Signal Processing.