Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced /'kɚtz.waɪl/) (b. February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. more...

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He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and the technological singularity. His work is often in the realms of futurology.

Life, inventions, and awards

Kurzweil grew up in Queens, New York. In his youth, he was an avid consumer of science fiction literature. By the age of 12 he had programmed his first computer. Shortly after his discovery of programming, he appeared on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he had built. In 1968 he sold a company he created that matched high schoolers with prospective colleges by answering a 200 question survey. He earned a B.Sc in Computer Science and Literature in 1970 from MIT.

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 flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. He has founded nine businesses in the fields of 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 United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the 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.

Kurzweil's musical keyboards company Kurzweil Music Systems produces among the most sophisticated and realistic (and expensive) synthesized-sound creation instruments. Ray sold Kurzweil Music Systems in the early 1990s to Korean piano manufacturer Young Chang. He has no current involvement with Young Chang or Kurzweil Music Systems.

Kurzweil has also created his own 25 year old female rock star alter ego, "Ramona", who he regularly performs as through virtual reality technology . This project inspired the plot of the movie S1m0ne

Read more at Wikipedia.org