Celebrating the Rubin and Cindy Gruber Sandbox
The Rubin and Cindy Gruber Sandbox — home of the MPCR Lab — was officially dedicated on March 23, 2023, with over 100 guests attending the celebration in the S.E. Wimberly Library on FAU’s Boca Raton campus.
This 3,400-square-foot experimental space is one of the nation’s first multi-disciplinary AI labs located in a university library, made possible by a generous $1 million gift from Rubin and Cindy Gruber. Part of the donation supports student scholarships through an endowment.
Students demonstrated over a dozen projects at the event, including AI safety research, musical cognition, and artificial immune systems. The dedication was attended by FAU President Emeritus John Kelly, Dean of the Schmidt College of Science Valery Forbes, Dean of FAU Libraries Linda Golian-Liu, and MPCR Lab founder Dr. William Hahn.
As Dean Forbes noted: “Given the increasing role that AI is playing in all of our lives, it is vital that we provide both the facilities and the opportunities for the next generation of problem solvers to be comfortable working in an AI-powered world.”