| Ray Kurzweil  AKA Raymond C. Kurzweil
Born: 12-Feb-1948
Birthplace: Queens, NY
Gender: Male
Religion: Atheist
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Inventor, Computer Programmer, Author Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Age of Spiritual Machines Ray Kurzweil is an author, entrepreneur, and inventor whose contributions include the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first omni-font (i.e., "any" font) optical character recognition, the first CCD (charge coupled device) flat bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments (so good even professional musicians could not distinuish it from the real thing), and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition technology.
When he was only 18 years old, Kurzweil appeared on the I've Got a Secret television program in 1965. Ray's famous secret? He had built his own computer, programming it to analyze the patterns in musical compositions by famous composers and then compose original new melodies in a similar style -- a project which won him first prize in the International Science Fair as well as the opportunity to meet President Lyndon B. Johnson as a Westinghouse Science Talent Search winner.
Kurzweil's next invention, and first foray as an entrepreneur, was a computer program that matched up high school kids with colleges. Greater ventures and inventions were to follow, eventually earning him such honors as the Lemelson-MIT Prize, induction into the National Inventor Hall of Fame, the 1999 National Medal of Technology (awarded by President Clinton), the 1994 Dickson Prize, and many other prestigious awards. Father: (musician, conductor)
Mother: (visual artist)
Wife: Sonya R. Kurzweil
University: BS Computer Science and Literature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1970)
Administrator: MIT Corporation
Association for Computing Machinery Fellow
edge.org
Foresight Nanotech Institute Board of Advisors
National Academy of Engineering
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
National Medal of Technology and Innovation 1999
Dickson Prize 1994
National Inventors Hall of Fame
Lemelson-MIT Prize 2001
Risk Factors: Diabetes
FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Terms and Conditions May Apply (22-Jan-2013) · Himself
The Singularity Is Near (26-Aug-2010) · Himself
Transcendent Man (5-Nov-2009) · Himself
How to Live Forever (Oct-2009) · Himself
Official Website:
http://www.kurzweilAI.net/
Author of books:
The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990)
The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease and Cancer (1993)
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)
Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004, with Terry Grossman, M.D.)
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)
Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (2009, with Terry Grossman, M.D.)
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