Raymond Kurzweil is one of the leading futurists and inventors of our time. He is the New York Times best- selling author of "THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR" and has written several other books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), trans-humanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is currently working on his next book, "HOW THE MIND WORKS AND HOW TO BUILD ONE." Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison" by Inc. Magazine. The 2009 documentary, TRANSCENDENT MAN, chronicled his life and ideas. He is also the co-founder of Singularity University, based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley, whose mission is to educate and inspire leaders to develop advancing technologies and to find solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges. Called "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil's ideas on the future have been touted by his many fans, who range from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton. Time magazine writes, "Kurzweil's eclectic career and propensity of combining science with practical-often humanitarian-applications have inspired comparisons with Thomas Edison." A recipient of the National Medal of Technology and an inductee in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, among many other honors, he is the author of four books: "Fantastic Voyage: The Science Behind Radical Life Extension", "The Age of Spiritual Machines", "The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life", and "The Age of Intelligent Machines." 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. Titles Science, Technology, and Invention: Strategies to Create the Future Reprogramming Biology: The New Paradigm The Coming Merger of Human and Machine: the Radical Expansion of Human Longevity and Intelligence The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Business, the Economy, and Society The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One Human Body Version 2.0: When Humans Transcend Biology How to Manage Innovation in an Era of Accelerating Technologies The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Education and Society The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Healthcare and Medicine The Democratization of Innovation in an Era of Accelerating Technologies 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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