A Bit About The History Of MIT’s Stata Center And AI
A Bit About The History Of MIT’s Stata Center And AI
Publish Date: 2026-05-24 11:46:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
The Stata Center on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. The Stata Center designed by architect Frank Gheary
Corbis via Getty Images
In the heart of the MIT campus, just off Vassar Street, amid some pretty interesting architecture, the Ray and Maria Strata Center sits amid other major landmarks, housing some of the most important departments that the community supports, focused on developing artificial intelligence. Most notably, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab or CSAIL, directed capably by my colleague Daniela Rus, is in there, where intrepid teams work on such vanguard projects as liquid AI models.
The Stata Center is a 430,000-square-foot academic complex with a 290,000-square-foot underground garage, and dates back to 2004. I recently sat down with Ray Strata, its namesake, at an April event here at MIT where we talked about how this part of the campus came to be.
Early Beginnings
Strata told us that, despite an early focus on physics, he ended up majoring in electrical engineering, and did his thesis in the instrumentation lab, where he worked on precision measurement of nonlinearities of strapped down gyroscopes.
“Today, you know, the gyroscope is instrumental in the smartphone,” he said. But at that time, most gyroscopes were for transportation. He also talked about the challenge of trying to create a precision rate table, and work on operational amplifiers.
Striking Out on His Own
Strata also told me about the beginning of his career in business.
“I had an aversion to authority,” he said. “I didn’t like people telling me what to do. So the question was, how was I going to work that out, when I took a job. So I decided when I was a sophomore in high school, the solution to that problem was to have your own company, you know, so you don’t have a boss. That was my motivation for starting a company.”
Eventually, he started that business with his roommate.
“We never really had a business plan of any…
