Sugata Mitra

About this Speaker

Sugata Mitra is Professor Emeritus at NIIT University, Rajasthan, India. A Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he retired in 2019 as Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in England, after 13 years there including a year in 2012 as Visiting Professor at MIT MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He conducted the Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiment, where in the year 1999 a computer was embedded within a wall in an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi and children were allowed to freely use it. The experiment aimed at proving that kids could be taught computers very easily without any formal training. Sugata termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated at many places. In England, he developed his ideas into Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLE) and finally into Schools in the Cloud. He is the recipient of many awards and honorary doctorates from India, the UK, USA and many other countries in the world – among them the Dewang Mehta award for innovations in IT from the Government of India (2003) and the million dollar TED award (2013) from the USA. His interests include Children’s Education, Remote Presence, Self-organising systems, Cognitive Systems, Physics and Consciousness.