2014 Interviews

Reinventing Education

Agarwal, Anant

Anant Agarwal presents "Reinventing Education." Anant Agarwal is President of edX and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He has served as the director of CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture and MIT's Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. Scientific American selected his work on organic computing as one of 10 world-changing ideas in 2011, and was named to Forbes Magazine's list of the top 15 education innovators in 2012. He taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries.
Agarwal is also a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works. He hacks on WebSim, an online circuits laboratory, in his spare time.