Ray C. Kurzweil

Overview

Ray C. Kurzweil, a director of Inforte since February 2000, is chairperson and chief executive officer of Kurzweil Technologies, Inc., a software development firm he founded in 1995. Mr. Kurzweil was the principal developer of many advanced technologies, including the first omni-font optical character recognition, 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 that could recreate acoustical instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition software. Mr. Kurzweil successfully founded and developed nine artificial intelligence businesses. Mr. Kurzweil's numerous awards include the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, received from President Clinton, and the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize for Invention in 2001. His book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was named Best Computer Science Book of 1990. His recent best-selling book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, achieved #1 status on Amazon.com in the categories of science and artificial intelligence. Mr. Kurzweil holds a B.S. in computer science and literature from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has been awarded eleven honorary doctorates. Mr. Kurzweil serves as a director of FatKat Inc. and United Therapeutics.