Mangalore: Mangalurean Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX and MIT Professor, is among the eminent recipients of the Padma awards for his contribution in the field of education and literature category.
edx.org is an online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT that allows users free access to its courses. Just last year, Agarwal was honored with the prestigious Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in education. He was named by Forbes magazine among the 15 “classroom revolutionaries” who use innovative technologies to reinvent education for students and teachers globally in the year 2012 and also holds a Guinness World Record for the largest microphone array.
Born to Dr K L Agarwal and Vijaya, Anant Agarwal entered the wedlock with Anuradha and the couple is blessed with two children Anisha and Akash. Agarwal is an alumni of St Aloysius College where he pursued his education from std 1 to second PUC (1977) before pursuing his BTech from IIT-Madras. He later followed it up with MS and PhD in electrical engineering from Standford University, USA.
At MIT, he led the development of Alewife, an early cache coherent multiprocessor, and also co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works.
He also has to his credit the USA Presidential Award for Young Scientists in the year 1999 and the Maurice Wilkes Award for computer architecture in 2001. He is author of the textbook “Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits.”
