James D. (JJ) Johnston

Chief Scientist, Immersion Networks

JJ is Chief Scientist of Immersion Networks. He has a long and distinguished career in electrical engineering, audio science, and digital signal processing. His research and product invention spans speech processing, hearing and psychoacoustics, perceptual encoding, image and video coding, and spatial audio creation. He was one of the first investigators in the field of perceptual audio coding, one of the inventors and standardizers of MPEG 1/2 audio Layer 3 and MPEG-2 AAC. Most recently, he has been working in the area of auditory perception and ways to expand the limited sense of realism available in standard audio playback for both captured and synthetic performances. JJ is named in over 100 patents for his work in perceptual audio and digital signal processing.

Johnston worked for AT&T Bell Labs and its successor AT&T Labs Research for two and a half decades. He later worked at Microsoft and then Neural Audio and its successors before joining IN. He is an IEEE Fellow, AES Fellow, AES technical papers chair for over two decades, NJ Inventor of the Year, AT&T Technical Medalist and Standards Awardee, and co-recipient of the IEEE Donald Fink Paper Award. In 2006, he received the James L. Flanagan Signal Processing Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and presented the 2012 Heyser Lecture at the AES 133rd Convention: Audio, Radio, Acoustics and Signal Processing: The Way Forward. In 2021, along with two colleagues, Johnston was awarded the Industrial Innovation Award by the Signal Processing Society “for contributions to the standardization of audio coding technology.”

Mr. Johnston received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University.