Biography|Bradley Horowitz — The Wiesner Building He Left Before the Doctorate

The Media Lab is built to keep people.

Horowitz used it as an exit.

After Michigan he entered the Vision and Modeling Group under Alex Pentland, in I. M. Pei's Wiesner Building — MIT Building E15 — at 20 Ames Street.

The white gridded box had opened in 1985.

In 1991 MIT accepted his master's thesis, Syntactic and semantic image representations for computer vision.

The file is still in DSpace under handle 1721.1/67107.

He started the PhD and then left it in 1993.

The turn was not another paper.

It was a company.

Virage, which he co-founded as chief technology officer, was a bet that software could pull searchable structure out of opaque video.

Later filings and reference works sometimes date the firm's start to 1994 or 1995.

His later biographies, and the records that follow them, keep 1993 as the year he walked out of the doctorate for the startup.

The Wiesner Building is still the public face of the lab, now paired with the later E14 block on Amherst Street.

A visitor comes for the atrium and the List Visual Arts Center, not for a private office.

The pin is the decision site.

Photo: Wiesner Building, MIT. John Phelan, 15 October 2011, via Wikimedia Commons.