Ray Kurzweil

Biography

Ray Kurzweil 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.

Ray Kurzweil 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, 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, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and international film awards.

Topics

• The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
• The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Business, the Economy, and Society
• The Emergence and Impact of Intelligent Machines
• An Exponentially Expanding Future from Exponentially Shrinking Technology
• The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One
• The Law of Accelerating Returns and the 21st Century
• Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the 21st Century

Publications

Ray’s books include:

• The Age of Intelligent Machines
• The Age of Spiritual Machines
• Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
• The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology.

Four of Ray’s books have been national best sellers and The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science.