Home > Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. He is author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines and a book to be released in early 2005, The Singularity is Near.He earned a bachelor's degree in 1970 from MIT.
Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni- font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCDA charge-coupled device CCD , is an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. Under the control of an external circuit, each capacitor can transfer its electric charge to one or other of its neighbours. CCDs are used in dig flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand pianoA grand piano is the concert form of a piano. A grand piano has the frame and strings placed horizontally, with the strings extending away from the keyboard. Grand pianos are distinguished from upright pianos, which have their strings and frame arranged v and other orchestraAn orchestra is a musical ensemble used most often in classical music. A small orchestra is called a chamber orchestra''. Full size orchestras may sometimes be called "symphony orchestras" or "philharmonic orchestras"; these prefixes do not indicate any dl instrumentA musical instrument is a device that has been constructed or modified with the purpose of making music. In principle, anything that somehow produces sound can serve as a musical instrument, but the expression is reserved generally to items that have thats, and the first commercially marketed large- vocabularyA vocabulary is a set of words known to a person or other entity, or that are part of a specific language. The vocabulary of a person is defined either as the set of all words that are understood by that person or the set of all words likely to be used by speech recognition. He has founded nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual realityVirtual reality (abbreviated VR describes an environment that is simulated by a computer. Most virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic goggles, but some simulatio, financial investment, medical simulation , and cybernetic art.
Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, 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.
He has also written a healthy living book The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life.
