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 consequence,” Strata said. “We had no money. It was a pretty feeble beginning.”
After the first forays, he said, his business went in-house with one of their clients as an internal department, and beyond things like operational amplifiers, they got involved in what would become the mainstay of the AI world.
“I decided if we were going to stay in that business, we had to learn how to make semiconductors,” he said. “So we started a division of the company to make semiconductors.”
Making Things Work – Together
Enumerating some of the challenges of the agentic web, Strata explained that the performance of a system depends more on how the parts work together, than how they work separately.
“In the early days, the focus was on perfecting the performance of the parts,” he said. “And then, as the parts became better and better, the emphasis became focused on how do you integrate those parts into subsystems or systems.”
Strata termed this ‘combinatorial innovation.’
“The first part of analog’s history was the development of the component parts from which you could make systems,” he said. “At some point, that got good enough to where the opportunity was: how do you put those together into subsystems?”
Going back to that idea of bucking authority, Strata said that he found his own sentiments to be quite common among the skilled professionals who do the work to build and maintain systems.
“I found that in hiring engineers, most of them thought pretty much the way I did,” he said. “
They didn’t want to have a boss either. They wanted to work in an environment where the ‘tops down’ was a very light touch, and where the important decisions were delegated to the people who knew how to do the work. So we established a culture in analog, which would be characterized by hiring great people and getting out of their way. That was sort of the culture, and indeed, we were very successful at doing that, at hiring some of the best designers in the analog world, and as a result of that, we made the best components in the areas where we competed.”
Your Baby
In remembering the process of building a business, and running it for a long time, Strata made this analogy:
“Giving birth to a company is, I guess, the closest thing to giving birth to a baby,” he said. “You
think of it in those terms. So your baby never grows up.”
The Making of the Strata Center
Here, Strata turned back to the realities that led to tech centralization on campus.
“The primary problem that the faculty complained about is that the electrical engineers and the computer scientists lived in different parts of the world,” he said, figuratively, “and so there was always begging for the administration to build a building where they could come together.”
So, Strata said, he asked the president for this solution.
And it happened, although, in conclusion, Strata conceded:
“We probably still wouldn’t have a building if they had known the real numbers,” he said.
I find this history to be crucial to the overall story of AI here at MIT. It’s important for everyone, including our younger people, to know about how all of this came together, and about the history of such a prestigious institution, if I may say so. Stay tuned for more of what comes out of our conferences and events, centered on the challenges and opportunities that we all share in a new age.
