Famed futurist Ray Kurzweil to discuss acceleration of technology


Ray Kurzweil, known as one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers and futurists will discuss “The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: The Impact on Business, the Economy and Society” during a lecture and panel discussion March 4 at 10 a.m. in the Graham Center ballrooms.

Ray Kurzweil

Panelists will include Ram Iyengar, director of FIU’s School of Computing and Information Sciences; Monica Chiarani Tremblay, assistant professor of decision sciences and information systems; and Kevin Maestre, a biomedical engineering student and engineering senator in the Student Government Association.

The discussion, part of the FIU Presidential Lecture Series, will be moderated by Giri Narasimhan, associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences

Kurzweil has a 30-year track record of accurate predictions. Called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine, 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; the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments; and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Among Kurzweil’s many honors, he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds 19 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has written seven books, five of which have been national best sellers.

He was recently appointed as director of engineering at Google.

 

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