MIT World Speakers

Ray Kurzweil '70

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition (OCR), 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 Kurzweil received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation’s largest award in invention and innovation, and was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventor Hall of Fame. He won the Winston Gordon medal from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind for his pioneering work using technology for the benefit of blind people. 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 received 12 honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has written five books and hundreds of articles. His most recent work,The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking), was published in Spring 2005.

Kurzweil received a B.S. in Computer Science and Literature, from MIT in 1970.