Ray Kurzweil
Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character
recognition system, 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 system. The successful founder of nine businesses, Kurzweil was the
recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the world's largest award for
invention and innovation, and was also the 1999 recipient of the National Medal
of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology. He has also been
awarded the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science
prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT,
and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing
Machinery. He has received ten honorary doctorates and honors from three U.S.
presidents, and seven national and international film awards. His current best
selling book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human
Intelligence
, has been published in nine languages, and his earlier book, The
Age of Intelligent Machines
, was named best computer science book of 1990.


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