Rebecca Costa

Biography:

Raymond Kurzweil was born in Queens, New York,  to parents who escaped Austria just prior to World War Two. Kurzweil grew up in a household which encouraged creativity.  His father was a noted conductor and music educator and his mother was an equally accomplished artist. The young Kurzweil became an early fan of science fiction and when he was just 15 years old he wrote his first computer program - a program that analyzed the music patterns of classical composers in order to generate new music using those patterns.  This won Kurzweil the top prize in the International Science Fair and an invitation to appear on the television show "I've Got A Secret." Kurzweil is a graduate of MIT – where during his sophomore year he started a company which used computers to match high school students to the best college.  This was to become the first of many inventions and companies Kurzweil was to father.

In 1974, he founded Kurzweil Computer Products which was responsible for the world's first omni-font character recognition system, flat bed scanner and text-to-speech synthesizer – technologies which had a major impact on the blind.  In fact, these discoveries led to an unexpected friendship with Stevie Wonder and subsequently, Kurzweil invention of the first music synthesizers which could replicate the sound of real instruments.

The fact is, we don't have enough time in our short program today to list all of the inventions Mr. Kurzweil is responsible for in the arts, education, medicine and most recently in the field of Artificial Intelligence.  And there is certainly not enough time to do justice to the number of high honors and awards bestowed on a man who has been called "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison." Suffice it to say, Kurzweil has directly or indirectly touched the lives of every human being on the planet and now that he has joined forces with Google, we can expect his visions to manifest even faster.  

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