Anant Agarwal is the Chief Open Education Officer of 2U/edX. He was the Founder and CEO of edX, an online learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT. Anant taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. He has served as the director of CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He is a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works.
Anant won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture, and MIT's Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. He held a Guinness World Record for the largest microphone array, and is an author of the textbook "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits."
His work on Organic Computing was selected by Scientific American as one of 10 World-Changing Ideas in 2011, and he was named in Forbes' list of top 15 education innovators in 2012. He received the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize for Higher Education in 2016, and the Padma Shri award from the President of India in 2017. He was also awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Development in 2018. Anant, a pioneer in computer architecture, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the ACM.
He has blogged about reimagining higher education on the Huffington Post, and was torn apart on the Colbert Report. He hacks on WebSim, which is an online circuits laboratory in his spare time. Anant holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor's from IIT Madras.
Anant's twitter handle is @agarwaledu
His previous projects include Raw, an early tiled multicore processor with 16 cores, fos, an operating system for clouds, Angstrom, which is creating fundamental technologies for exascale computing, Sparcle, a coarse-grain multithreaded (CGMT or switch-on-event SOE) microprocessor, Alewife, a scalable distributed shared memory multiprocessor, Virtual Wires, a scalable FPGA-based logic emulation system, LOUD, a beamforming microphone array, Oxygen, a pervasive human-centered computing project, and Fugu, a protected, multiuser multiprocessor.
To contact Professor Agarwal, you may send him e-mail at (agarwal at& edx dot& org). His US mail address is
Anant AgarwalAnant Agarwal's bio
edX
141 Portland Street, 9th floor
Cambridge, MA 02139
USA