Global Indian: Anant Agarwal

Birth: 1959 (Delhi).

Education: Anant Agarwal did his schooling in St. Aloysius Mangalore. Agarwal holds a bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Career:

Mr. Agarwal is the CEO of edX, a worldwide, online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard. He is a leader of the Carbon Project, which is developing 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.

He is a leader of the Angstrom Project, which is creating fundamental technologies for exascale computing. He contributes to WebSim, a web-based electronic circuits’ laboratory. He led the Raw Project at CSAIL, and is a founder of Tilera Corporation. Raw was an early tiled multicore processor with 16 cores.

He also teaches the edX offering of MIT’s 6.002 Circuits and Electronics.

His previous projects include 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 beam forming microphone array, Oxygen, a pervasive human-centred computing project, and Fugu, a protected, multiuser multiprocessor.

Awards and Recognition:

• In 2001 Mr Agarwal received Maurice Wilkes Award for computer architecture.
• In 2007 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
• In 2011 he was appointed as Director of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
• In 2013, he was appointed the CEO of EdX
• In March 2016, he was awarded the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education in higher education
• He received Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India in 2017
• In 2018, he received the Yidan Prize for Education Research, the world’s largest education award.