Ray Kurzweil: The Futurist

On Tuesday September 13^th, the University of Rhode Island invited Dr. Ray Kurzweil to speak at the honors colloquium.  For those of you who have never heard of Dr. Kurzweil, here is a little background information about him.  Dr. Kurzweil is an inventor; he is credited with inventing the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition system (OCR), the first print to speech system for the blind, and many other things.  Forbes magazine ranked him number 8 among inventors in the United States, comparing him to Thomas Edison, and PBS includes him as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America”.  He has also been inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame by the US Patent office.  Dr. Kurzweil has also received 19 honorary doctorates at the time of writing this.  And in September of 2008 Dr. Kurzweil founded a University in 2008, Singularity University, which is backed by Google, and is on the NASA Ames campus. Read more