Sugata Mitra

Exploring the unmapped terrain between human and machine learning has been the main interest of Professor Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in the UK. He is also, Chief Scientist Emeritus with NIIT Limited, India, one of the largest private educators in the world. Mitra devises new ways to make computers, software and other artificial systems more intuitive for learning and more useful through the incorporation of such human characteristics as self-organization and adaptive, proactive, and emotive behavior. Like all fundamental research, it leads in surprising directions. One of the best known is Mitra’s discovery that modern multimedia computers and children are literally “made for each other,” with cognitive processes so similar that children need little or no instruction to master computing at the basic level.  Mitra is building on this discovery through the design of hardware and software that enable children to reach the intermediate to expert level entirely on their own.The global consequences of Mitra’s discovery for closing the digital divide have resulted in many international awards and other honors, among them:· The National Science Talent Scholarship, 1969-1978.· The National Merit Scholarship, 1969.· The Indo-Austrian Research Scholarship, 1980-1981.· The Raizada award for the best paper of 1999 from the Computer Society of India, 1999.· The “Best ICT story” award from the IICD at the World Bank’s Global Knowledge II conference in Kuala Lumpur, March 2000.· The “Best Social Innovation of the year 2000” award from the Institute for social inventions, UK, 2000.· The “Man for Peace” award for 2002 from the Together For Peace Foundation, Italy, 2002· Finalist, World Technology Awards, education category, World Technology Network, San Francisco, June, 2003· The Dewang Mehta award for innovation in IT, Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India, 2005· Best Education Research Article in an Open Access Journal for 2005, The Communication of Research Special Interest Group of  the American  Educational Research Association, 2006Trained as a physicist and biologist, Dr. Mitra received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Solid State Physics of Organic Semiconductors from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 1978. After completing a research fellowship in Austria, he returned to IIT as for further post-doctoral research and teaching. Since that time he has worked to set up laboratories and head Research and Development Centres in the Publishing and Training industries. He joined Newcastle in 2006.