Keynote Speakers

Director, Federica Weblearning

Professor of Political Science, University of Naples Federico II, and Past-President of the Società Italiana di Scienza Politica. He is the Editor of the IPSA Web Portal for Electronic Sources. His international activities include Visiting Professor, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris; Visiting Professor and Research Fellow, Cornell University; Research Fellow, Harvard Center for European Studies. His recent interests focus on Internet epistemology and culture. With Theodore J. Lowi, he has published Hyperpolitics, an Interactive Dictionary of Political Science, University of Chicago Press and www.hyperpolitics.net.

Director of Stanford Open Learning Initiative

Candace Thille is a pioneer in learning science and open educational delivery. Founding director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, part of which shifted to Stanford when she moved, she has done groundbreaking work on using cognitive science and rich data on how students learn to try to transform the teaching and learning process.

CEO, edX | Professor MIT

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 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 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.

Class Central – CEO

Dhawal discovered a passion for education during his time as a masters student in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. When free online courses from top universities started popping up, Dhawal built a one page site to keep track of these courses. That site, Class Central, is now the leading destination for finding MOOCs as well as understanding what is happening in the world of MOOCs. Since 2011, more than 20 million learners have used Class Central to decide which online course to take.

Dhawal himself has completed over a dozen MOOCs and has written over 200 articles on MOOCs, read by millions of people every year. Dhawal is a columnist for EdSurge and has written for publications including Techcrunch, VentureBeat, Quarz, and Observer.

Deputy Head of Unit “Innovation and EIT” – European Commission

Georgi Dimitrov joined the European Commission in 2008. Between 2009 and 2013 he was involved in various roles in setting up the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). In 2014/2015 Georgi managed the launch of HEInnovate, an initiative by the European Commission and the OECD that supports entrepreneurial and innovative universities. He then acquired experience as a policy advisor to senior management. In January 2017 Georgi assumed the role of a Deputy Head of Unit “Innovation and EIT” in DG EAC where he is currently responsible for the EIT and its future strategy; digital education; and innovation and education including business-university cooperation. Before joining the Commission, Georgi worked for a leading multinational telecommunication company in Germany. Prior to that, he worked in a software start-up for four years in Germany. Georgi studied at the University of Bonn (M.A.), the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (PhD) and the Open University UK (towards MBA in Technology Management).