Sheryl Handler (born 1955) is an American businesswoman recognized as one of the founders of

Thinking Machines Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachuset ...

who is the founder and current CEO of

Ab Initio ''Ab initio'' ( ) is a Latin term meaning "from the beginning" and is derived from the Latin ''ab'' ("from") + ''initio'', ablative singular of ''initium'' ("beginning"). Etymology Circa 1600, from Latin, literally "from the beginning", from ab ...

Education and career

Handler attended

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Reser ...

for interior design and received her master's degree in landscape architecture from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. Handler had previously participated in the start-up of the

Genetics Institute :''This article is primarily about Genetics Institute prior to its 1996 acquisition by Wyeth. For that successor company, see Wyeth.'' Genetics Institute, Inc. was a biotechnology research and development company founded by Thomas Maniatis and Mar ...

at Harvard and was pursuing her doctorate in city planning at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

when she met

Danny Hillis William Daniel "Danny" Hillis (born September 25, 1956) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a paralle ...

, a fellow MIT graduate student working on

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...

. Hillis and his PhD advisor,

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, an ...

, were looking to market a

connection machine A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...

as a tool with which to develop software programs for artificial intelligence. Handler helped found the

Thinking Machines Corporation Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and Danny Hillis, W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the ...

, where she served as CEO until 1992. After Thinking Machines went bankrupt in 1995, Handler and several other former employees founded Ab Initio Software.

References

1955 births Living people American computer businesspeople Harvard Graduate School of Design alumni Case Western Reserve University alumni MIT School of Architecture and Planning alumni American women business executives {{US-business-bio-1950s-stub