Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison. PBS selected him as one of the "sixteen revolutionaries who made America."
Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, 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.
Among Ray’s many honors, he received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written six national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near and How To Create A Mind. His latest novel, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, is an Amazon Best Seller and was a Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 Children’s Fiction book. He is co-founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
"Ray came in and really inspired our employees. His presentation was extremely well received, and many people in the audience expressed their gratitude for being in the presence of one of their true heroes. My inbox has been filled with thanks and expressions of how their perspective on their job has really changed. I don’t think we could have asked for much more than that!”
"We are still excited and full with adrenaline following the exciting talk by Mr. Kurzweil. The presentation was a remarkable achievement. It was fluent and brilliant."
"Ray's presence at an institution can have a transformative effect, and I can see it already in a flurry of emails expressing interest in teaching with technology, and especially Second Life. When we at Berklee chart our development in our use of technology, Ray’s visit and the impact of his ideas will be a milestone, causing a paradigm shift that helped us not only grow, but understand our growth."
"His speech was great, a the trove of fascinating content. We wanted someone who would educate the audience about what's ahead, think strategically about the future and inspire them to be innovative. He nailed it. We are deeply appreciative."