Raymond Kurzweil
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 music keyboards. He is author of The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines.
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 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, medical simulation, and cybernetic art. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray's Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.
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. 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 in 1998, the Association of American Publishes' Award for the 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.
