 Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist.
Called "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate
thinking machine" by Forbes, Kurzweil's ideas on the future have been touted by
his many fans, ranging from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton. MIT's Marvin Minsky
writes that "with his brilliant descriptions of the coming connections of
computers with immortality, Ray Kurzweil clearly takes his place as a leading
futurist of our time." George Gilder writes that "Kurzweil's ideas make all
other roads to the computer future look like goat paths in Patagonia .
" Sun Microsystems Chief Scientist Bill Joy, whose own discussions of the
promise and peril of technology have attracted worldwide attention, writes in
his now famous Wired magazine cover story that "I can date the onset of my
unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the
first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things." Stevie
Wonder writes "Ray's technology and ideas have truly been among the sunshines of
my life. Ray Kurzweil's writings are a wonderful riff on the next century from a
keen seer, a great inventor, and a good friend." Ray Kurzweil is widely regarded
as one of the leading inventors of our time.TIME Magazine writes "Kurzweil's
eclectic career and propensity of combining science with practical - often
humanitarian - applications have inspired comparisons with Thomas Edison."
Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character
recognition (OCR), 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.
These technologies continue today as market leaders in their respective
industries, industries which Ray Kurzweil pioneered. Ray Kurzweil has
successfully founded and developed nine companies in OCR, music synthesis,
speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment,
medical simulation, and cybernetic art. Ray Kurzweil is a widely sought speaker,
and has given keynote presentations at many leading venues, including PC Expo,
SIGGRAPH, TED, ICASSP, the American Psychiatric Association, Agenda, and many
others. His presentations to diverse audiences combine wit and keen insight into
contemporary issues of technology and its impact on society. His lectures often
include appearances by "Ramona," his "virtual female alter ego," and other
engaging demonstrations of cutting edge technologies that Ray Kurzweil and his
teams have developed.
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