Mangalorean Anant Agarwal in Forbes List of Education Innovators

Daijiworld Media Network - Mangalore
With Inputs from Ruchir Agarwal and PTI

Mangalore, Nov 11: Here's yet another reason for Mangaloreans to feel proud.

Anant Agarwal, a Mangalorean and currently the president of eDX.com in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, has been named by Forbes magazine among the 15 "classroom revolutionaries" who are using innovative technologies to reinvent education for students and teachers globally.

The Forbes list names 15 education innovators who are "harnessing a slew of disruptive technologies to change everything from the way we teach grade school math to how we train the next generation of teachers."

Agarwal did his early education in city's St Aloysius College right from std 1 to second PUC (1977). He then moved to IIT-Madras where he did his BTech, and followed it up with MS and PhD in electrical engineering from Standford University, USA.

He has been featured in Guiness Book of World Records too for the largest microphone array in the world. He was conferred the USA Presidential Award for Young Scientists in the year 1999 and the Maurice Wilkes Award for computer architechture in 2001.

At MIT, he led the development of Alewife, an early cache coherent multiprocessor, and also founded Tilera, a fabless semiconductor company focusing on scalable multicore embedded processor design.

Agarwal is currently the president of edX, the new combined online offerings of Harvard, MIT, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas. Over 400,000 are currently enrolled in the education programme. "We've created dramatic access to learning for students worldwide. By reinventing online learning, we can dramatically improve what we do on campus," Agarwal, who took over as head of eDX in May this year, told the media.

"EdX continues to up the ante by increasing partners, classes (seven to dozens for spring 2013) and innovations, such as virtual laboratories," stated Forbes.

Son of Dr K L Agarwal and Vijaya, Anant Agarwal is married to Anuradha and the couple is blessed with two children Anisha and Akash.

Another Indian, Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of Datawind, the maker of India's low-cost tablet Aakash, also features among the Forbes list of innovators in education.