Widely regarded as one of the leading inventors of our time, TIME Magazine writes, "Kurzweil's eclectic career and propensity of combining science with practical - often humanitarian - applications have inspired comparisons with Thomas Edison." Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition (OCR), 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.
His national best-selling novel, The Age of Spiritual Machines, has received worldwide acclaim and reached #1 status on Amazon.com in the categories of both Science and Artificial Intelligence. His latest book, The Singularity is Near, already in its fourth printing, takes convergence to the next level where man, machine and computer merge.
Ray Kurzweil received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation, and was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventor Hall of Fame. He received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. Dr. Kurzweil has received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. In addition, he has received twelve honorary doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents, as well as seven national and international film awards.
Bill Gates, Chairman Microsoft, had this to say about Ray Kurzweil and his latest book. "Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. His intriguing new book envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations - transforming our lives in ways we can't yet imagine."
"Kurzweil's ideas make all other roads to the computer future look like goat paths in Patagonia," said George Gilder, EIC of Gilder Technology Report.
Tom Buscaglia, IEI Executive Director stated, "We are truly honored to have Ray Kurzweil, one of the world's true technology visionaries, as this year's Keynote. The convergence of technologies across multiple disciplines is essential to business innovation and no one understands the impact of convergence of the technologies used by the G.A.M.E.S. Disciplines better than Ray Kurzweil. Quite simply, Kurzweil's presence at GSS06 takes this event to new heights and exceeds our already extremely high standards for content."
An acronym for Government, Academic, Military, Entertainment and Simulation, the G.A.M.E.S. Synergy Summit is the premier conference addressing the convergence of interactive gaming, immersive entertainment and simulation tools, techniques and technologies for beneficial applications. Developers, practitioners, users and policy makers from each of these synergistic sectors learn together how the best attributes of each discipline can be combined in new and useful ways to address a broad range of non-entertainment applications for game-based technologies.
More information on G.A.M.E.S. Synergy Summit 2006 available at www.synergysummit.com