Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health technology, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is an advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. He received the $500,000 Lemelson–MIT Prize in 2001. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the application of technology to improve human-machine communication. In 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has 21 honorary doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. The Public Broadcasting Service included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him No. 8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him "Edison's rightful heir".
Life, inventions, and business career
Early life
Kurzweil grew up in Queens, New York City. He attended NYC Public Education Kingsbury Elementary School PS188. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had emigrated from Austria just before the onset of World War II. Through Unitarian Universalism he was exposed to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. The Unitarian church has a philosophy that there are many paths to the truth: his religious education consisted of studying one religion for six months before moving on to another. His father, Fredric, was a concert pianist, a noted conductor and a music educator. His mother, Hannah, was a visual artist. He is the elder of two children; his sister Enid, an accountant in Santa Barbara, is six years his junior.Ray Kurzweil decided at age five that he wanted to be an inventor. As a young boy, he had an inventory of parts from various construction toys he had been given and old electronic gadgets he had collected from neighbors. In his youth, Kurzweil was an avid reader of science fiction. At age eight, nine, and ten, he read the entire Tom Swift Jr. series. At age seven or eight, he built a robotic puppet theater and robotic game. He was involved with computers by age 12, when only a dozen computers existed in New York City, and built computing devices and statistical programs for the predecessor of Head Start. At age 14, Kurzweil wrote a paper detailing his theory of the neocortex. His parents were involved with the arts, and he is quoted in the documentary Transcendent Man as saying that the household always discussed the future and technology.
Kurzweil attended Martin Van Buren High School. During class, he often held onto his class textbooks to seemingly participate while focusing on his own projects hidden behind the book. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught Kurzweil the basics of computer science. In 1963, at 15, he wrote his first computer program.
Kurzweil created pattern-recognition software that analyzed the works of classical composers, then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. In 1965 he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece composed by a computer he had built. Later in the year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention; his submission to Westinghouse Talent Search of his first computer program alongside several other projects resulted in his being one of the contest's national winners, for which President Lyndon B. Johnson personally congratulated him during a White House ceremony. The experiences impressed upon Kurzweil the belief that nearly any problem could be overcome.
Midlife
While in high school, Kurzweil had corresponded with Marvin Minsky and was invited to visit him at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he did. Kurzweil also visited Frank Rosenblatt, a psychologist at Cornell. He attended MIT to study with Minsky, obtaining a B.Sc. degree in computer science and literature in 1970. Kurzweil took all the computer programming courses MIT offered in his first year and a half.In 1968, during his second year at MIT, Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges. The program, called the Select College Consulting Program, was designed by him and compared thousands of different criteria about each college with questionnaire answers each student applicant submitted. Around that time he sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World for $100,000 plus royalties. In 1974, he founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc., and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had been able to read text in only a few fonts. He decided that the technology's best application would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand text by having a computer read it to them aloud. But the device required the invention of two enabling technologies—the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions like Bell Labs, and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by Kurzweil and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device was large and covered an entire tabletop. Stevie Wonder heard about the demonstration of this new machine on The Today Show, and later became the user of the first production Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a long-term association with Kurzweil.
Kurzweil's next major business venture began in 1978, when Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program. LexisNexis was one of the first customers, and bought the program to upload paper legal and news documents to its nascent online databases. He sold Kurzweil Computer Products to Xerox, where it was first known as Xerox Imaging Systems and later as Scansoft; he was a consultant for Xerox until 1995. In 1999, Visioneer, Inc. acquired Scansoft from Xerox to form a new public company with Scansoft as the new company-wide name. Scansoft merged with Nuance Communications in 2005.
Kurzweil's next business venture was in electronic music technology. After a 1982 meeting with Stevie Wonder, in which Wonder lamented the divide in capabilities and qualities between electronic synthesizers and traditional musical instruments, Kurzweil was inspired to create a new generation of synthesizers that could duplicate the sounds of real instruments. Kurzweil Music Systems was founded in the same year, and in 1984, the Kurzweil K250 was unveiled. The machine could imitate a number of instruments, and according to Kurzweil's press packet, musicians could not tell the difference between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode and a grand piano, though reviewers who actually attempted it questioned that. The machine's recording and mixing abilities coupled with its ability to imitate different instruments made it possible for a single user to compose and play an entire orchestral piece.
South Korean musical instrument manufacturer Young Chang bought Kurzweil Music Systems in 1990. As with Xerox, Kurzweil remained as a consultant for several years. Hyundai acquired Young Chang in 2006, and in 2007 appointed Kurzweil as Chief Strategy Officer of Kurzweil Music Systems. Concurrent with Kurzweil Music Systems, he created the company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence to develop computer speech recognition systems for commercial use. The first product, which debuted in 1987, was an early speech recognition program. KAI was sold to Lernout & Hauspie in 1997.
Later life
Kurzweil started Kurzweil Educational Systems in 1996 to develop new pattern-recognition-based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in school. Products include the Kurzweil 1000 text-to-speech converter software program, which enables a computer to read electronic and scanned text aloud to blind or visually impaired users, and the Kurzweil 3000 program, a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills. Kurzweil sold KESI to Lernout & Hauspie. After the legal and bankruptcy problems of the latter, he and other KESI employees bought back the company. KESI was eventually sold to Cambium Learning Group, Inc.File:Raymond Kurzweil, Stanford 2006.jpg|thumb|left|Raymond Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in 2006
During the 1990s, Kurzweil founded the Medical Learning Company. In 1999, Kurzweil created a hedge fund called "FatKat", which began trading in 2006. He has said that the ultimate aim is to improve the performance of FatKat's A.I. investment software program, enhancing its ability to recognize patterns in "currency fluctuations and stock-ownership trends". In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicted that computers would one day be better than humans at making profitable investment decisions. In June 2005, Kurzweil introduced the "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" —a pocket-sized device consisting of a digital camera and computer unit. Like the Kurzweil Reading Machine of almost 30 years before, the K-NFB Reader is designed to aid blind people by reading written text aloud. The newer machine is portable and scans text through digital camera images, while the older machine is large and scans text through flatbed scanning.
In December 2012, Google hired Kurzweil in a full-time position to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing". Google co-founder Larry Page personally hired him. Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: "to bring natural language understanding to Google". Kurzweil received a Technical Grammy Award on February 8, 2015, specifically for his invention of the Kurzweil K250.
Kurzweil has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. After his death, he has a plan to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him.