Anant Agarwal

CEO, edX

Anant Agarwal is the CEO of edX, an online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT. Anant 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 a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works.

Anant 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 the recipient of the Padma Shri award, the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India. 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. Anant, 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. Anant’s twitter handle is @agarwaledu.

Mauro Calise

Founder & Director Federica Weblearning

Mauro Calise is Professor of Political Science at the University of Naples Federico II and a Past-President of the Società Italiana di Scienza Politica (2008-10).
He is the founder and Director of federica.eu (www.Federica.eu), the largest worldwide provider of open access multimedia courseware in Italian. He is the Editor and Director of the International Political Science Association Web Portal for Electronic Sources (www.IPSAPortal.net).
His international activities include the International Political Science Association (Vice-President, 2000-2003); Visiting Professor, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris; Visiting Professor and Research Fellow, Cornell University; Research Fellow, Harvard Center for European Studies.
He has published books, journal articles and newspaper columns in several areas, including state theory, political parties, executive elites, political communication and concept analysis. He is the author, with Theodore J. Lowi, of Hyperpolitics. An Interactive Dictionary of Political Science Concepts, University of Chicago Press (www.hyperpolitics.net).

With 300 blended courses and 75 MOOCs Federica Weblearning is the first Italian University Center fully devoted to innovation and experimentation of multimedia distance education, with intense international cooperation.

Chance Coughenour

Google – Program Manager Google Arts & Culture

Chance Coughenour, Program Manager at Google Arts & Culture, coordinates cultural heritage preservation efforts. He organizes partnerships and leads projects which employ emerging technology for cultural heritage documentation and dissemination. Prior to joining Google in October 2016, Chance participated in archaeological research and cultural heritage documentation projects throughout Europe and the Americas. He is also the co-founder of Rekrei, a volunteer, crowdsourcing project for destroyed heritage. Previously, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Institute for Photogrammetry, University of Stuttgart in Germany.