The Sesquicentennial celebrations will come to a close on February 14, 2008 with a keynote speech by Ray Kurzweil, author, entrepreneur, inventor and futurist.
Ray Kurzweil is widely regarded as one of the leading inventors of our time. 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.
Kurzweil has written five books and hundreds of articles. In the year 2001, there were over 200 articles by or about Ray Kurzweil in leading publications, including most major national magazines. His first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was named Best Computer Science Book of 1990. This book, written in the late 1980s, has been acclaimed for its remarkably accurate predictions about the 1990s and early 2000 years.
Learn more about Ray Kurzweil, courtesy of Keppler Speakers
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