Ray Kurzweil

Dr. Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a twenty-year track record of accurate predictions. Dr. Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which describes him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” He is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, the technological singularity, and futurism, including the best-selling The Singularity Is Near.

In 2002, Dr. Kurzweil was inducted 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, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. 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, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received thirteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.