Joint Colloquium Distinguished Lecture Series
Reinventing Education
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Wednesday, October 17, 2012 Anant Agarwal |
Abstract:
Prof. Agarwal will be speaking about edX, a not-for-profit enterprise of its founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that features learning designed specifically for interactive study via the web, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and online education.
Biography
Anant Agarwal is the President of edX, an online learning venture of Harvard and MIT. Prof. Agarwal taught the first course of edX on circuits and electronics, 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. His research focused on operating systems and computer architectures for manycores and clouds. He is also a founder of Tilera Corporation which created the Tile multicore processor. Agarwal holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor's from IIT Madras. He led the development of Raw – an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle – an early multithreaded microprocessor, and Alewife – a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. Agarwal won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture, and MIT’s Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. He holds 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 one of 12 Bostonians changing the world by Boston Globe Magazine in 2012.
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