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Ray Kurzweil has been described as the restless genius by the Wall Street Journal and the ultimate thinking machine by Forbes. In addition, Inc. magazine recently ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States calling him the rightful heir to Thomas Edison, and PBS included Mr. Kurzweil as one of 16 revolutionaries who made America. Mr. Kurzweil is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest prize for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the United States’ highest honor in technology. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame established by the US Patent Office. As one of the leading inventors of our time, Mr. Kurzweil has worked in such areas as music synthesis, speech and character recognition, reading technology, virtual reality and cybernetic art. He 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. | 