Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is 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 Kurzweil has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art.

Ray Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He received the $500,000 Lemelson MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation. Ray Kurzweil also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology from President Clinton, the 1994 Dickson 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 11 honorary Doctorates.

Ray Kurzweil has received seven national and international film awards. His book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was named Best Computer Science Book of 1990. His current 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.com in the categories of "Science" and "Artificial Intelligence."