Ray Kurzweil is a world class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a 35-year track record of accurate predictions. He 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, and many more. For these achievements, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.”

Ray has received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology. He is also the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and holds honors from three US presidents. Ray has written five national best-selling books including The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How to Create a Mind (2012). He is also a principal researcher and AI visionary at Google, looking at the long-term implications of technology and society