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
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.