 |
Links:
|
Ray Kurzweil has been described
as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal,
and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc.
magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States,
calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and
PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,”
along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray has worked in
such areas as music synthesis, speech and character recognition,
reading technology, virtual reality and cybernetic art. All of these
pioneering technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray 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’s web site Kurzweil
AI.net has over one million readers.
Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000
MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999,
he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest
honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony.
And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of
Fame , established by the US Patent Office .
He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three
U.S. presidents.
Ray’s books include The Age of Intelligent Machines,
The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live
Long Enough to Live Forever. Three 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. Ray Kurzweil’s new book, published
by Viking Press, is entitled The Singularity is Near, When Humans
Transcend Biology.
Click here to read Ray Kurzweil's
full biography.
 |