Sheryl Handler (born 1955) is an American businesswoman recognized as one of the founders of Thinking Machines who is the founder and current CEO of Ab Initio.
Handler attended Case Western Reserve University for interior design and received her master's degree in landscape architecture from Harvard University. [1] Handler had previously participated in the start-up of the Genetics Institute at Harvard and was pursuing her doctorate in city planning at MIT when she met Danny Hillis, a fellow MIT graduate student working on parallel computing. [2] Hillis and his PhD advisor, Marvin Minsky, were looking to market a connection machine as a tool with which to develop software programs for artificial intelligence. [1] Handler helped found the Thinking Machines Corporation, where she served as CEO until 1992. After Thinking Machines went bankrupt in 1995, Handler and several other former employees founded Ab Initio Software.
Marvin Lee Minsky 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, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
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 Technology (MIT) in the early 1980s. Starting with CM-1, the machines were intended originally for applications in artificial intelligence (AI) and symbolic processing, but later versions found greater success in the field of computational science.
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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product named the Connection Machine. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab. Thinking Machines made some of the most powerful supercomputers of the time, and by 1993 the four fastest computers in the world were Connection Machines. The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1994; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were acquired in time by Sun Microsystems.
The MIT Sloan School of Management is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, as well as executive education. Its degree programs are among the most selective in the world. MIT Sloan emphasizes innovation in practice and research. Many influential ideas in management and finance originated at the school, including the Black–Scholes model, the Solow–Swan model, the random walk hypothesis, the binomial options pricing model, and the field of system dynamics. The faculty has included numerous Nobel laureates in economics and John Bates Clark Medal winners.
William Daniel "Danny" Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was Vice President of Research and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering.
Philip Greenspun is an American computer scientist, educator, early Internet entrepreneur, and pilot who was a pioneer in developing online communities like photo.net.
Ab Initio Software is an American multinational enterprise software corporation based in Lexington, Massachusetts. The company specializes in high-volume data processing applications and enterprise application integration. It was founded in 1995 by the former CEO of Thinking Machines Corporation, Sheryl Handler, and several other former employees after the bankruptcy of that company.
Women in computing were among the first programmers in the early 20th century, and contributed substantially to the industry. As technology and practices altered, the role of women as programmers has changed, and the recorded history of the field has downplayed their achievements.
Idit R. Harel is an Israeli-American entrepreneur and CEO of Globaloria. She is a learning sciences researcher and pioneer of Constructionist learning-based EdTech interventions.
The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is the engineering school within Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, offering degrees in engineering and applied sciences to graduate students admitted directly to SEAS, and to undergraduates admitted first to Harvard College. Previously the Lawrence Scientific School and then the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Paulson School assumed its current structure in 2007. Francis J. Doyle III has been its dean since 2015.
Nancy G. Leveson is an American specialist in system and software safety and a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, United States.
Yoky Matsuoka is the CEO and Founder of Yohana. She was the CTO of Google Nest, a co-founder of Google X and previously held roles as VP of Technology and Analytics at Twitter, technology executive at Apple, and as VP of Technology at Nest.
Diane B. Greene is an American technology entrepreneur and executive. Greene started her career as a naval architect before transitioning to the tech industry, where she was a founder and CEO of VMware from 1998 until 2008. She was a board director of Google and CEO of Google Cloud from 2015 until 2019. She was also the co-founder and CEO of two startups, Bebop and VXtreme, which were acquired by Google and Microsoft, for $380 million and $75 million.
Douglas (Doug) Levin is an American businessman, technologist, and serial entrepreneur. He is the sole founder and first CEO of Black Duck Software.
Vivek Yeshwant Ranadivé is an Indian-American business executive, engineer, author, speaker and philanthropist. Ranadivé
Rashmi Sinha is an Indian businesswoman and CEO of San Francisco-based technology company SlideShare. In 2012, Fortune named her No. 8 on its Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs list. In 2008, Rashmi was named one of the World's Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company. In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.
Barry Marshall Richmond was an American systems scientist, and former managing director of High Performance Systems, Inc (HPS), an organization providing software and consulting services to build the capacity of people to understand and improve the workings of dynamic systems. He is known as a leader in the field of systems thinking and system dynamics and for the development of the STELLA/iThink modelling environment for simulation.
Sandra L. Kurtzig is an American businesswoman and technology entrepreneur. She was one of Silicon Valley's first female entrepreneurs, and as the founder of the business and manufacturing software producer ASK Group in 1972, was the first woman to take a Silicon Valley technology company public.
This is a timeline of women in computing. It covers the time when women worked as "human computers" and then as programmers of physical computers. Eventually, women programmers went on to write software, develop Internet technologies and other types of programming. Women have also been involved in computer science, various related types of engineering and computer hardware.