Ray Kurzweil





Raymond Kurzweil is an American inventor, futurist, and entrepreneur. He was born February 12, 1948. The picture shows him at age 60. He has done pioneering work in optical character recognition, electronic keyboard instruments, and speech recognition technology.

Kurtweil is also a futurist. See an excellent 10 minute overview of his current insights into the future.

Kurzweil's inventions and futuristic thinking have a helped a great deal to improve education throughout the world.

Optical Character Recognition
Quoting from Kurtzweil's Biography:


 * Ray and his team created the first "omni-font" (any font) Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This new technology became a solution in search of a problem. A chance plane flight sitting next to a blind gentleman convinced Ray that the most exciting application of this new technology would be to create a machine that could read printed and typed documents out loud, thereby overcoming the reading handicap of blind and visually impaired individuals.


 * This goal introduced new hurdles, since there were no readily available flat-bed scanners or speech synthesizers in 1974. So in addition to the omni-font OCR, Ray and his colleagues developed the first CCD flat-bed scanner and the first full text-to-speech synthesizer and combined these three technologies into the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind.


 * Ray, along with leaders of the National Federation of the Blind, announced the Kurzweil Reading Machine at a press conference on January 13, 1976,which was covered by all of the networks and leading print publications. Walter Cronkite used it to deliver his signature sign-off, "And that's the way it was, January 13, 1976."

Electronic Keyboard Instruments
His is a little "techie talk" from a July 20, 2006 interview.


 * Mark David: Ray, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.


 * I've been interested in the contributions you've made over the course of my career, in that I spent a lot of years at a magazine called Automatic I.D. News, which covered alternatives to keyboard data entry, optical character recognition (OCR), bar code, and so forth. So, I was aware of a lot of your work in the OCR field. It's a pleasure and an honor to talk to you.


 * And then, I'm also a musician. So I'm certainly aware of your contributions there on the keyboard side, too. Was it the first sampling keyboard? Is that what your initial invention was there?


 * Ray Kurzweil: Well, it's the first electronic keyboard that could accurately recreate the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.


 * Mark David: So, it was really the level of sampling and...


 * Ray Kurzweil: Yeah; it was more than sampling, although it did incorporate sampling. It really modeled the response of a piano. Because if you just sample a piano, it doesn't convincingly recreate it. For example, samples will loop the last wave form because they don't really have enough memory to have the note sustain for 30, 40 seconds. When you loop the last wave form of a piano, all the overtones become perfect multiples of the harmonic, of the fundamentals. And this begins to sound like an organ.


 * Mark David: Right.


 * Ray Kurzweil: One of the things that make a piano sound unique is that the partials are actually slightly off the perfect multiple. They are called enharmonic. And there's a lot of other details like that [which] samples fail to capture. If you hit middle-C harder, it's not just louder. There's high frequency partials [which] attack more quickly and die off in a different pattern.


 * So we captured all of those subtle differences—really modeled the acoustic response of a piano—and it really sounded like a piano and felt like a piano. And we did AB tests with concert pianists and they were successful. Other samplers just didn't come close.


 * So, it was the first really successful recreation of complex acoustic instruments like the piano in an electronic instrument.


 * Mark David: Great contribution. That's great.


 * Ray Kurzweil: Thanks.

Speech Recognition
Quotin from an August 26, 2008 article/interview in Information Week:


 * Kurzweil: One vision we had dating back to 1980 when we started speech recognition was to apply to this to the deaf. The idea is that a deaf person would have a little display, which could be built into their eyeglasses where they would basically get subtitles on the world.


 * On the one hand it's a demanding technology because it has to be speaker-independent, have a large or unrestricted vocabulary, and support continuous speech. On the other hand, it doesn't require perfect accuracy. The early reading machines were highly inaccurate, but a blind person would be able to make up for it from context. A deaf person could similarly understand from context what was being said. Indeed human speech recognition, particularly in compromised acoustic environments, is not perfect either, and we can pick up from context in chat at cocktail parties, or at least pretend to understand what's being said.


 * I think we're pretty close to being able to do that at least in good acoustic environments, maybe not at a cocktail party, but if the person is being picked up, with pretty good accuracy. If you take something like Dragon Naturally Speaking, which combines the original Dragon technology in the Kurzweil speech recognition, which is now in Nuance, which actually used to be Kurzweil Computer Products, my first company. That accuracy is quite high. A New York Times reporter recently wrote that using his own voice with no training with the software never having heard him before was over 98.3% accurate on a 100,000 word vocabulary. And that's certainly accurate enough for the deaf application. I think prototypes of that could be put together that would work, at least in good acoustic environments.


 * Greene: You're currently demonstrating the KNFB Reader Mobile, which is a cell phone that is also a reading machine. What is the background for this device?


 * Kurzweil: In 2002 the President of the National Federation for the Blind said, 'Ray for years you've been saying that one day a blind person will be able to use a pocket size device to read signs, meeting handouts, menus, and other displays. When do you think this will be feasible?' I said according to our models we'll have the requisite hardware in six years. He said, 'OK, how long will it take to develop the software? I said, well about six years, so he said let's get started. We began in 2002. Right on schedule this spring, hardware that could run this application, a 4-mega pixel camera, sufficiently powered computers of about 300 megahertz and enough memory became available for the first time.


 * A little to our surprise we also got the software done on time and we introduced it this summer. Now about 1,000 blind guys and gals and dyslexic individuals are going around taking pictures of signs on the wall and handouts at meetings like this one and using this device.


 * The device is also a GPS navigation system, MP3 player, e-mail reader, web browser, phone and camera as well as being a reading machine in seven languages that also does the translation. This is all done with voice-directed output and voice prompts to help guide a blind or dyslexic person through use. We're working on additional features in our laboratory such as face recognition, object recognition, and the ability to recognize indoor scenes, like a hallway and office to help tell a blind person where they are.

Voice Input Systems
Many people and companies have worked on the speech to text problem. There are a variety of relatively inexpensive products now available.

In 1985, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence introduced the first speech-to-text computer program. Quoting from http://www.atp.nist.gov/eao/sp950-3/kaii.htm:


 * Kurzweil was founded in 1982 and proposed to use its experience, industry knowledge, and market presence to leverage the production of the interface. In 1985, the company had introduced Kurzweil Voice System, the first 1,000-word discrete-speech recognizer. This interface, adaptable to many applications, allowed the user to control the application by voice without modifying the operating system or software.


 * In 1987, Kurzweil introduced the first 20,000-word discrete-speech recognizer, which was incorporated into Kurzweil Voice Report software and allowed users to create structured reports by voice. A component of this technology was the Structured Report Generator (SRG). One of the key features of Kurzweil's SRG software was its ability to respond to a "trigger phrase," which is a spoken word or phrase that triggers an entire predefined report segment. Trigger phrases are designed to elicit multiple choices and alternatives as well as highlighted, fill-in-the-blank fields. The use of trigger phrases, along with word-by-word dictation, has the potential to allow users to generate custom reports by using a few spoken words. The project team built on these past efforts to develop the proposed technologies under the ATP project.

Quoting from http://www.atp.nist.gov/eao/sp950-3/kaii.htm:


 * During the early 1990s, tremendous market opportunities emerged for speech recognition computer technology, yet no company had been able to develop a system that could recognize natural language continuous speech commands. Development of this type of technology presented too high a level of scientific risk to attract private investment. Therefore, in 1994, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Inc., applied for and was awarded cost-shared funding from the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) to pursue a three-year development project. With the help of ATP funding, Kurzweil successfully developed fully operational continuous dictation technology. The technology has since been integrated into Lernout & Hauspie's VoiceXpressTM product, which allows voice control of Microsoft and Corel Office software products.

Futurist
See http://www.aeispeakers.com/video.php?SpeakerID=586. Some key ideas:


 * Exponential growth rate of information technology.
 * Information technology is increasingly pervasive.
 * Increasing decentralization of our technology base and infrastructure.
 * Increasing human lifetime.

The short talk referenced above forecasts when information technology becoming the dominant component of our economy, and when computers will become more powerful than the human brain. Kurzweil believes that both will occur in the 2020s.

Books
Drawing heavily from the Wikipedia:


 * Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was published in 1990. The nonfiction work discusses the history of computer AI and also makes forecasts regarding likely future developments. Other experts in the field of AI contribute heavily to the work in the form of essays. The Association of American Publishers' awarded it the status of Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990.


 * Kurzweil published a book on nutrition in 1993 called The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life. The book's main idea is that high levels of fat intake are the cause of many health disorders common in the U.S., and thus that cutting fat consumption down to 10% of the total calories consumed would be optimal for most people.


 * In 1999, Ray Kurzweil published The Age of Spiritual Machines, which focuses heavily on further elucidating his beliefs regarding the future of technology, which themselves stem from his analysis of long-term trends in biological and technological evolution. Much focus goes into examining the likely course of AI development, along with the future of computer architecture.


 * Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2005) was co-authored by Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, a medical doctor and specialist in alternative medicine. While the book proffers conventional advice like avoiding unhealthy foods, getting regular exercise and keeping a positive outlook on life, it departs from the mainstream due to its advocacy of aggressive dietary supplementation, alkaline water and other measures.


 * The Singularity Is Near was published in 2005. It examines the next step in the evolutionary process of the union of human and machine. Kurzweil foresees the dawning of a new civilization where we will be able to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity, combining our biological skills with the vastly greater capacity, speed and knowledge The book is currently being made into a movie starring Pauley Perrette (NCIS), and scheduled for early 2009 release.[8][9]

Joins Google in January, 2013
Hof, Robert D. (4/23/2013). Deep learning. Technology Review. Retrieved 4/26/2013 from http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513696/deep-learning/. Quoting from the article:


 * When Ray Kurzweil met with Google CEO Larry Page last July, he wasn’t looking for a job. A respected inventor who’s become a machine-intelligence futurist, Kurzweil wanted to discuss his upcoming book How to Create a Mind. He told Page, who had read an early draft, that he wanted to start a company to develop his ideas about how to build a truly intelligent computer: one that could understand language and then make inferences and decisions on its own.


 * It quickly became obvious that such an effort would require nothing less than Google-scale data and computing power. “I could try to give you some access to it,” Page told Kurzweil. “But it’s going to be very difficult to do that for an independent company.” So Page suggested that Kurzweil, who had never held a job anywhere but his own companies, join Google instead. It didn’t take Kurzweil long to make up his mind: in January [2013] he started working for Google as a director of engineering. “This is the culmination of literally 50 years of my focus on artificial intelligence,” he says.

Awards and Honors
Some of Kurzweil's awards and honors include:


 * The 1978 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. The award is given annually to one "outstanding young computer professional" and is accompanied by a $35,000 prize.Ray Kurzweil won it for his invention of the Kurzweil Reading Machine.
 * The 1994 Dickson Prize in Science. One is awarded every year by Carnegie Mellon University to individuals who have "notably advanced the field of science." Both a medal and a $50,000 prize are presented to winners.
 * The 1998 "Inventor of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 * The 1999 National Medal of Technology. This is the highest award the President of the United States can bestow upon individuals and groups for pioneering new technologies, and the President dispenses the award at his discretion.Bill Clinton presented Ray Kurzweil with the National Medal of Technology in recognition of Kurzweil's development of computer-based technologies to help the disabled.
 * The 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing technologies to help the disabled and to enrich the arts. Only one is meted out each year to highly successful, mid-career inventors. A $500,000 award accompanies the prize.
 * Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for inventing the Kurzweil Reading Machine. The organization "honors the women and men responsible for the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible."
 * Ray Kurzweil has been given 16 honorary degrees from different universities.

Improving Education
Many blind people learn Braille, and that gives them some access to written materials. It takes considerable effort to learn to read Braille, exceeding a speed of about 60 words per minute is an especially difficult challenge, and most of the world's collection of written materials is not available in Braille. Students often face a significant delay in obtaining access to Braille versions of textbooks and other course reading materials.

Thus, the Kurzweil's development of an omni-font reading machine was a huge breakthrough. Although initial versions were both large and expensive, the technology has gotten better and better over the years. Inexpensive, portable, handheld devices are now in wide use.

This is an example of where technology has made a huge contribution to helping to solve an educational problem faced by a modest percentage of the world's population.

And, the same technology is quite useful to sighted people in a variety of situations. Consider, for example, a person who has never learned to read. An omni-font reader can speak the text of printed material. When combined with language translation software, such a system can help a person deal with material written in languages that they do not know.

For example, consider a person whose eyesight is declining with age, and who perhaps needs a magnifying glass to read small type. A hand held omni-text reader may be a better aid.

Here is a somewhat different type of example. Consider a person walking or driving through an unfamiliar town. Modern GPS and affiliated technology can keep the person informed of where they are, how to get to where they want to go, and provide information about what they are seeing. Continuing progress in Google Earth will provide detailed information about the buildings one sees and allow virtual field trips to towns throughout the world.

Personal Comment by David Moursund 1/1/09
I distinctly remember when I first encountered Kurzweil's 1999 book, The Age of the Spiritual Machine. I was at a conference and Harvey Long (one of the Pioneers in the field of computers in education) had just purchased a copy. I tried my best to talk Harvey out of his copy —however, I failed— and I got a chance to read a few pages as we listened to one of the conference talks. So, I bought one in an airport bookstore on my trip home. I have read two other Kurzweil books written since then. I rank them as good, but not as good as the first one I read. I have also enjoyed reading some of his articles and viewing some of his talks. See, for example, his February 2005 23 minute TED talk]  How technology's accelerating power will transform us.

Videos
2005. TED talk.

2006. The Singularity Summit was founded in 2006 by Tyler Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, and Peter Thiel, the inaugural summit was held at Stanford May 13, 2006). The video of Kurzweil's address is divided into three pieces and is available on the Web.


 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PWXrnsSrf0&feature=related


 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSSYyFqpS3U&feature=related


 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYIj3VxSdzI&feature=related

2007. A conversation with Ray Kurzweil.

Author or Authors
The initial version of this Page was developed by David Moursund.