Biography|Goh Choon Phong — The Tech Square Lab Where He Chose the Airline Over a PhD

People now point at the Stata Center when they talk about MIT computer science.

In 1990 the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory still rented the top of 545 Technology Square, MIT building NE43, across Main Street from the campus proper.

Goh Choon Phong finished three bachelor's degrees at MIT — computer science and engineering, management science, and cognitive science — and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science.

Singapore Airlines paid for the American years.

On 30 August 1990 he submitted the master's thesis titled Model Selection for Solving Kinematics Problems, supervised at the AI Lab by Randall Davis.

An APEX profile later recorded the fork that followed: stay for a doctorate in artificial intelligence, or return to Singapore as a cadet administrative officer under the bond.

He took the airline.

The building he worked in did not survive as NE43.

The labs left Tech Square in 2004 for the new Stata Center on Vassar Street.

545 Technology Square was gutted and redesignated 200 Technology Square, now a life-sciences office in the Alexandria complex.

The plaza is still there, on the Port side of Kendall Square, at roughly 42.3633 north, 71.0910 west.

A visitor will not find the ninth-floor AI rooms.

What remains is the plot where an SIA scholar wrote a kinematics thesis and then declined the obvious next paper.

The later CEO years in Changi are a consequence of that choice, not a replacement for it.

Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Adjacent block: Jim Henderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.