Another Great Jewish-American Scientist and Inventor, Ray Kurzweil

Ray 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 CCD flat-bed scanner, 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
has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music
synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality,
financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial
intelligence . All of these technologies continue today as market
leaders. Ray's Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on
artificial intelligence.

Ray 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 (view the video), 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 twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from
three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and
international film awards. Ray's books include The Age of Intelligent
Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live
Long Enough to Live Forever. Four of Ray's books have been national
best sellers and The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated
into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in
science. Ray Kurzweil's new book, published by Viking Press, is
entitled The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology.

.