Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist. Called "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes, Kurzweil's ideas on the future have been touted by his many fans, ranging from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton. Kurzweil's best-selling book, "The Age of Spiritual Machines," has received widespread acclaim. It has achieved the #1 status on Amazon in the categories of both science and artificial intelligence and has been published in nine languages. Kurzweil's writings are for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next. Ray Kurzweil is widely regarded as one of the leading inventors of our time. TIME Magazine writes, "Kurzweil's eclectic career and propensity of combining science with practical - often humanitarian - applications have inspired comparisons with Thomas Edison." 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. These technologies continue today as market leaders in their respective industries, industries that Ray Kurzweil pioneered. Kurzweil has successfully founded and developed nine companies in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art. 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 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. Kurzweil is a widely sought speaker and has given keynote presentations at many leading venues, including the Microsoft CEO Summit, the World Economic Forum, Pop!Tech, PC Expo, Business Week, The Council on Foreign Relations, SIGGRAPH, Cowen, TED, ICASSP, the American Psychiatric Association, Agenda, and many others. His presentations to diverse audiences combine wit and keen insight into contemporary issues of technology and its impact on society. His lectures often include appearances by "Ramona," his "virtual female alter ego," and other engaging demonstrations of cutting-edge technologies that Kurzweil and his teams have developed. Kurzweil has written five books--four of which have been national best-sellers--and hundreds of articles. Titles The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One The Accelerating Impact of Exponentially Expanding Complex Systems Reprogramming Biology: The New Paradigm Reverse Engineering the Human Body and Brain -- The Impact on Human Health and Society Innovation in the 21st Century The Power of an Idea How Far will Technology Transform Humanity? Computers and Consciousness The Forces of Deflation: Why We Don't Need High Interest Rates to Counter Inflation A Confluence of Exponential Trends 21st Century Technology and the Capital Markets Topics Technology, Creativity, Entrepreneur, Future Click topic above to see more speakers on that topic Speaker's Asking Fee Range Please call us. Click on fee range to see more speakers. This is the starting keynote fee range - other programs may be higher. State MA Click on state above to see more speakers from that state. Fees The fee range quoted means the speaker's fee starts somewhere within that range. Note that speaker's fees are subject to change and some speakers may have special fee quotes.

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