Born in Srinagar, Kashmir, he was educated in various places in Jammu and Kashmir. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and then joined it as a professor. During 1975-1976, he was a visiting faculty at Imperial College, London, and a guest researcher at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill.
In 1977, he was a visiting researcher at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay. During 1979-2007, he was with Louisiana State
University, Baton Rouge where he served most recently as Donald C. and Elaine T. Delaune Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
His research has spanned the fields of information theory, cryptography, neural networks, and quantum information.
He developed the theory of d-sequences for applications to computing and cryptography and he has worked on a variety of problems on data and network security.
The inventor of a family of instantaneously trained neural networks (also patented), which could be a model for short-term memory, for
which a variety of artificial intelligence applications have been found, he has argued that brain function is associated with three kinds of language: associative, reorganizational, and quantum.
He has written on philosophy of mind and showed how recursion plays a fundamental role in art, music and aesthetics.
He was the first to look for an information metric in a quantum state
over thirty years ago. His work on quantum information includes the only all-quantum protocol for
public-key cryptography. He has found bounds on the capabilities of
quantum computers and recently proposed
a new measure of information for quantum systems.
He has written on science for the general public and his work has been showcased in the popular media including Discovery and History channels and on PBS as well as Dutch Public TV.
He has also consulted with industry and served on the board of several companies.
Applying cryptographic theory to the study of ancient scripts,
he showed that on probabilistic grounds the Indus script must
be the originator of the later Brahmi script.
He also found a long-forgotten astronomy of the ancient world that
has been called "revolutionary" and "epoch-making" by scholars
and which has had considerable influence on the understanding of the rise of science in the ancient world.
He is the author of 11 books of which the most recent is
"The Architecture of Knowledge." He is also the author of 6 books of verse.
These books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Serbian.
Amongst his awards include British Council Fellow (1976), Science Academy Medal of the Indian National Science Academy (1977), Kothari Prize (1977), UNESCO Tokten Award (1986), Goyal Prize (1998), National Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (2001), and Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Delhi (2002).