Tuesday, April 30, 2013

The MIT

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of biggest names in computer science. For any software engineer, it is on the same level as Stanford University and everything that has been invented in the Silicon Valley. No wonder the MIT was a must-see on our trips to Boston.

We couldn't make it into most of the buildings, but the most spectacular (and most controversial) building on the MIT Campus, the Stata Center, designed by Architect Frank Gehry, is visible to everyone:







The Stata Center hosts the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which is inextricably linked to names like Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Richard Stallmann, Joseph Weizenbaum or Tim Berners-Lee. Its architecture is really fancy, everything is somehow slanted and looks a bit strange, with many different kinds of surfaces, textures and materials. I was totally amazed and I suppose this is a pretty cool place to work, think and invent.

PS. Sadly enough, but I didn't want to withhold it, the Stata Center is (very) close to the spot where the MIT police officer Sean Collier was shot to death after the Boston Marathon bombings.