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. Back to the Full Schedule.