WALTHAM, MA—INDIA New England News, the region’s oldest and largest print and online and video magazine, today announced that Anant Agarwal, who was named in Forbes’ list of top 15 education innovators in 2012 and holds a Guinness World Record for the largest microphone array, will be the Chief Guest and keynote speaker at the 13th Annual Woman of the Year Awards Gala on June 4th at Burlington Marriott Hotel in Burlington, MA.
Mr. Agarwal is the Chief Executive Officer of edx, an online learning destination founded by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It has 155,000 students in 162 countries.
Over 400 business and community leaders from across New England are expected to attend the annual red-carpet gala and honor 20 outstanding women from the region for their contribution in various areas, including art and culture, business, social and community service, charity, health, politics, science, research and technology. An independent panel of will also pick one of these 20 outstanding women as Woman of the Year 2015.
“We are very pleased that Mr. Agarwal has accepted our invitation to deliver the keynote address at the 13th Annual Woman of the Year Awards Gala,” said Upendra Mishra, publisher of INDIA New England News and its sister publications IndUS Business Journal, Real Estate Times and Desi Bridal News.
In 2014, Desh Deshpande, one of the nation’s leading philanthropists, was the chief guest and keynote speaker. Deshpande, a trustee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), also serves as Chairman of the Akshaya Patra Foundation USA, whose dual mission is to address childhood hunger and malnutrition and to promote education for underserved children in India.
Mr. Agarwal , the 2015 keynote speaker, has served as the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He is a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works.
He 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.”
Scientific American selected his work on organic computing as one of 10 World- Changing Ideas in 2011, and he was named in 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. Anant holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor’s from IIT Madras.
