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Raymond Kurzweil
Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. He is author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and the Singularity.
He earned a bachelor's degree in 1970 from MIT.
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 flatbed 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. He has founded nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation , and cybernetic art.
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, United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.
He has also received scores of other 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 in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received eleven honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
In December 2004, Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Published books
- The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990)
- The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life (1994)
- The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (2000)
- Fantastic Voyage : Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004)
- The Singularity is Near (to be released 21 April, 2005)
Kurzweil is the co-author (and subject) of the 2002 book Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I.. He also wrote the introduction to the 2003 computer graphics book Virtual Humans.
External links
- Official Biography http://www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html
- Machine Dreams http://www.cio.com/archive/101504/interview.html - CIO Magazine interview
- KurzweilAI.net http://www.kurzweilai.net/ - a VAST resource, including some of his books for free...
- Detailed Official Biography http://www.kurzweilai.net/bios/bio0005.html?printable=1
Categories: 1948 births | Artificial intelligence researchers | Science writers | Technology writers | Transhumanists | Health and wellness writers | Digital Revolution