Professor Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University. He works in the areas of Cognitive Science, Information Science and Educational Technology, and along with Physics and Energy he has been working in these areas for over 30 years. He has a PhD in Theoretical Solid State Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Dehli.

Professor Mitra’s contributions include a number of inventions and first-time applications. He is credited with having started the database publishing industry (particularly the Yellow Page industry) in India and Bangladesh, as well as having implemented the first applications of digital multimedia and internet based education in India in the late 1980s. His ‘hole in the wall’ experiments with the internet and children have been reported worldwide since 1999.

One of the best known aspects of Professor Mitra’s work is his discovery that the internet, 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 currently building on this discovery through the design of hardware and software that enable children to reach an intermediate to expert level entirely on their own. His current research is leading towards an alternative primary education which uses self-organised learning, mediation and assessment environments.

Professor Mitra has received numerous international awards and honours, including the Raizada award for the best paper of 1999 from the Computer Society of India; the ‘Best ICT story’ award in 2000 from the IICD; the ‘Best Social Innovation of the year 2000’ award from the Institute for Social Inventions; finalist in the ‘World Technology Awards’ education category from the World Technology Network in 2003; the Dewang Mehta award for innovation in IT from the Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India in 2005; ‘Best Education Research Article’ in an Open Access Journal for 2005 from the Communication of Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association; Alumni Award for Outstanding Contribution to National Development from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2006 and Best Book award from the Indian Society for Training and Development in 2007.

Professor Mitra’s work inspired the 2005 book ‘Q & A’, which went on to become the Oscar winning film Slumdog Millionaire.

Professor Sugata Mitra is participating in the Opening learning: new ambitions for higher education in a Web 2.0 world session.