Agarwal officially CSAIL’s director
Agarwal officially CSAIL’s director
Anant Agarwal, a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, assumed his role as director of CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) last Friday on July 1. Agarwal will succeed Professor Victor W. Zue ’76, who held the directorship for four years. CSAIL is MIT’s largest interdisciplinary lab and is home to over 900 undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers.
CSAIL, which is housed in the iconic Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center, has three research focuses: artificial intelligence, systems, and theory. Over 50 research groups and 100 principal investigators from eight different departments are part of CSAIL.
In a letter to all of CSAIL, School of Engineering Dean Ian A. Waitz wrote that he was excited for Agarwal’s “vision and enthusiasm as he takes on this important leadership role.”
Agarwal currently heads the Carbon Research Group within CSAIL, which is devoted to creating operating systems and multicore architectures. His recent focus has been Project Angstrom, which is a multidisciplinary effort to develop a computational model for exascale computing and new multicore systems.
In addition to his academic work at MIT, Agarwal is the chief technology officer and cofounder of the Tilera Corporation, a semiconductor company that specializes in processors. The company has created the Tile multicore processor, along with Virtual Machine Works, which brought the VirtualWires project at MIT into the market. Agarwal also assisted with the development of processors such as Raw, Sparcle, and Alewife.
He received his PhD from Stanford and his Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. In 2005, he published a textbook, Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits.
—Jessica J. Pourian