Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil, BSc, 7 Hon DScs, 3 Hon LHDs, Hon DMus, Hon DEng, Hon DHumanities was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. His web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.
Ray was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize (view the video), the nation’s largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has also received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University’s top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News , Inventor of the Year from MIT, the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, and the 2006 IEEE Professional Communication Societies Goldsmith Award. He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and international film awards. In 2005, he won our Guardian Award.
His patents include Reading system displaying scanned images with dual highlights, Compression / decompression algorithm for image documents having text, graphical and color content, System for controlling multiple user application programs by spoken input, Patient simulator, Technique for distributing software,System for controlling multiple user application programs by spoken input, Reading machine system for the blind having a dictionary, Virtual patient hot spots, Poet personalities, and Virtual reality presentation.
Ray’s book, The Age of Intelligent Machines , was named Best Computer Science Book of 1990. His best-selling book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence , has been published in nine languages and achieved the #1 best selling book on Amazon in the categories of “Science” and “Artificial Intelligence”. He and Terry Grossman, M.D. coauthored Fantastic Voyage : Live Long Enough to Live Forever. His recently wrote The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology and his latest book is Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever .
Listen to the speech and follow-up speech by Ray at The Singularity Summit at Stanford. Read the transcript of the Washington Post moderated live chat session with Ray Kurzweil! Listen to his Keynote Address at the 2nd Annual Terasem Workshop on Geoethical Nanotechnology, How Neuronanotechnology Will Lead to Melding of Mind and Machine, and watch the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. Watch his three hour interview on C-SPAN2 Book TV’s monthly “In Depth” show! Listen to his interview on Popular Science. Watch his SENS 3 presentation How exponential progress will affect the next decade and beyond .