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Ray Kurzweil

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Ray Kurzweil

Inventor Raymond Kurzweil attends a screening and panel discussion of Transcendent Man - a new documentary about inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Getty Images/ Andrew H. Walker

Inventor, Entrepreneur, Writer, and Futurist - Who is Ray Kurzweil?:

Ray Kurzweil has been described as a pioneer in the field of human-computer interfacing. He invented the flatbed scanner, the Kurzweil reading machine, the Kurzweil 1000 OCR software, the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech-recognition software, and the Kurzweil 250 Music Synthesizer. He is also the author of many books including, The Age of Intelligent Machines, named Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990.

Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind:

Early 1970s, optical character recognition (OCR) machines only worked with one style of type. Ray Kurzweil was inspired by a blind man who sat next to him on an airplane, who said he needed something that could read all types of text. Ray Kurzweil developed both a flatbed scanner and a full text-to-speech OCR program with improved character recognition

The prototype of the Kurzweil reading machine was completed in 1975, and announced on January 13, 1976. It had only 64,000 bytes of memory and cost $30,000 to $50,000.

Ray Kurzweil - Awards:

  • 1990 News' Engineer of the Year award
  • 1999 National Medal of Technology, America's highest honor in technology
  • 2001 $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize

Ray Kurzweil - Quotes:

“…at today’s rate of change, we will achieve an amount of progress equivalent to that of the whole 20th century in 14 years ….”

"By 2020 we'll have at least in a routine personal computer type computer about equal to the human brain..."

"I'm Confident About Energy, the Environment, Longevity, and Wealth; I'm Optimistic (But Not Necessarily Confident) Of the Avoidance Of Existential Downsides; And I'm Hopeful (But Not Necessarily Optimistic) About a Repeat Of 9-11 (Or Worse)"

Ray Kurzweil - Books:

Ray Kurzweil - Biography:

Ray Kurzweil was born in Queens, New York in 1948. Kurzweil's father was a conductor and musician, his mother was an artist, his grandmother, was one of the first women in Europe to earn a PhD in chemistry, and his uncle was a engineer at Bell Labs.

At the age of twelve, Ray Kurzweil built his first computing device and learned how to write programs. By the age of fifteen, Kurzweil began researching pattern recognition, and started to design computers to recognition patterns.

In 1970, Ray Kurzweil received his BS from MIT with a double major in computer science and creative writing.

As an entrepreneur, Ray Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products, a software and hardware company, and Kurzweil Technologies, where he is working on an Accelerating Intelligence Network that showcases the ideas of leading technologists.

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