1982 - B.Tech - Electrical Engineering Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and President @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University and edX
Professor Anant Agarwal obtained his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1982, and went on to do his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, USA, obtaining his doctorate in 1987.
Prof. Agarwal has been a faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since January 1988. He is currently the President of edX, a worldwide, online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University. This transformative online learning platform is designed to offer courses featuring video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories and student-paced learning. Anant is a visionary, and a strong proponent of the blended learning model and MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) which can help revolutionize education.
Prof. Agarwal has taken other innovative technologies out of academia and into start-ups. He is the founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the “Tile” multicore processor. In his research, he led the “Carbon Project”, which developed new scalable multicore architectures, a new operating system for multicore and clouds called “fos”, and a distributed, parallel simulator for multicore and clouds called “Graphite”.
Prof. Agarwal has won numerous honors for his teaching, research and entrepreneurial successes. His work on Organic Computing was selected by Scientific American as one of 10 “World-Changing Ideas” in 2011. He has been named as Forbes list of top 15 education innovators in 2012. He has won many teaching honors at MIT, including the Smullin and Jamieson awards.
In recognition of Prof. Anant Agarwal’s outstanding career in multiple roles as a superb teacher, visionary in education, researcher and path-breaking technologist, IIT Madras and its alumni are proud to confer him this award.
