Ray Kurzweil, How Technology will Transform Us, 7 p.m., OUC Ballroom
Described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal,
and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes, Kurzweil was ranked #8
among entrepreneurs in the United States by Inc. magazine, who labeled
him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” PBS included Ray as one of 16
“revolutionaries who made America,” among inventors of the past two
centuries. As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the
principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first
omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech
reading machine for the blind, 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. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has
more than one million readers. Kurzweil is the recipient of the $500,000
MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation, the 1999
National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology,
and is a 2002 inductee to the U.S. Patent Office’s National Inventors
Hall of Fame.