Sugata Mitra সুগত মিত্ৰ |
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Native name | সুগত মিত্ৰ |
Born |
Calcutta, West Bengal, India |
12 February 1952
Nationality | Indian |
Occupation | Professor |
Known for | Hole in the Wall project |
Sugata Mitra explaining the Hole in Wall after winning the TED Prize. | |
The Hole in the Wall Experiment, a TED talk, 2007 | |
The Child-Driven Education, a TED talk, 2010 | |
Build a School in the Cloud, a TED talk, 2013 |
Sugata Mitra (Bengali: সুগত মিত্র; born 12 February 1952) is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England. He is best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at the for-profit training company NIIT. He won the TED Prize 2013.
Mitra was born in a Bengali family in Calcutta, India on 12 February 1952.
He gained a publication in organic chemistry. After earning a PhD in Solid State Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, he went on to research battery technology at the Centre for Energy Studies in the IIT, and later at the Technische Universität, Vienna. He published a paper on a zinc-chlorine battery and a speculative paper on why the human sense organs are located where they are.
He then worked setting up networked computers stating he created the "Yellow Pages" industry in India and Bangladesh.
Mitra is a leading proponent of Minimally invasive education. He has a PhD in Physics but is credited with more than 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and education technology. He was conferred the Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Information Technology in the year 2005. In September 2012 Mitra won the Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award in the "Crossing Border" category. He argued that broken connections in simulated neural networks are a model for Alzheimer's disease (The effect of synaptic disconnection on bi-directional associative recall. S. Mitra, Proc. IEEE/SMC Conf., Vol.1, 989, 1994 USA).