Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor. When Kurzweil was 15, he began his first project involving pattern recognition—teaching machines how to see and understand patterns in information. In high school, Kurzweil began corresponding with Marvin Minsky, an artificial intelligence guru at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kurzweil chose to attend MIT partially because of his relationship with Minsky. There he double-majored in computer science and creative writing.

While he was taking classes, Kurzweil founded a company where he used a computer to match high school students with colleges. He later sold his company to Harcourt for $100,000 plus royalties. In 1970, he completed his BS at MIT and just a few years later he founded Kurzweil Computer Products, a software and hardware company. There Kurzweil and his team invented what would be one of the hallmarks of his entire career—the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which included the first CCD ("charge coupled device") flatbed scanner and first omni-font OCR ("optical character recognition") software. The machine used only 64K of RAM and was able to scan lines of text one at a time. The machine "recognized" each character as it passed regardless of typestyle; corrected the order of the characters in its memory; determined the pronunciation of the resultant words according to pre-programmed phonological rules; and articulated those words through a speech synthesizer, also created by the company.