Professor Sanjay Sarma
Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Sanjay Sarma is the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He was Vice President for Open Learning. He co-founded the Auto-ID Center at MIT and developed many of the key technologies behind the EPC suite of RFID standards now used worldwide. He was also the the founder and CTO of OATSystems, which was acquired by Checkpoint Systems (NYSE: CKP) in 2008. He serves on the boards of GS1US and Aclara Resources (TSE:ARA) and several startup companies including Cleanlab. Dr. Sarma received his Bachelors from the Indian Institute of Technology, his Masters from Carnegie Mellon University and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Sarma also worked at Schlumberger Oilfield Services in Aberdeen, UK, and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in Berkeley, California. He has authored over 150 papers in sensing, IoT, RFID, manufacturing and other fields.

Speaker is speaking for:

Keynote 1: The Future of Learning

Labor is evolving rapidly — from the jobs we do to the impacts of rapid innovation, and from the ways we work to the contours of employment itself. This is a worldwide trend, and indeed the impacts are transnational. Learning — primary, secondary, tertiary, and so-called quaternary, or lifelong, are becoming fulcrums of this change. Learning, however, is not well-understood by most educators today, and the institutions of learning must change — particularly if they want to participate in the future labor economy. I will describe the science of learning and how such changes might occur in education, in educational attainment and in new modalities for education.