Anant Agarwal is the CEO of edX, an online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT. Agarwal taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, 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. He is also a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Virtual Machine Works and Tilera, which created the Tile multicore processor.
Agarwal won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture and MIT's Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. He is also the 2016 recipient of the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize for Higher Education, which recognized his work in advancing the MOOC movement. Additionally, he is a recipient of the Padma Shri award from the president of India and was named the Yidan Prize for Education Development Laureate in 2018. 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."
Scientific American selected his work on organic computing as one of 10 WorldChanging Ideas in 2011, and he made Forbes' list of top 15 education innovators in 2012.
Agarwal, a pioneer in computer architecture, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the ACM. He hacks on WebSim, an online circuits laboratory, in his spare time.
He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor's from IIT Madras.