One of the world's leading inventors, thinkers and futurists: Who is Raymond Kurzweil?

He was born on February 12, 1948, in New York. His father, Frederic Kurzweil, was a musician and composer; his mother Hannah was a visual artist. The couple flees their home in Austria to settle in New York as Hitler devours Central Europe. Ray Kurzweil and his sister Enid grow up in an atmosphere of music and art. Although young Ray loved to play the piano, he knew from an early age that he wanted to be a scientist and inventor, and he pursued these interests with determination.

Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

Kurzweil was 12 years old when he was fascinated by the possibilities of the computer. An engineer at Bell Labs introduces him to the basics of computer science and gets him to work with a New York University computer. He wrote the first computer program at the age of 15. He creates a pattern recognition software program that he uses to analyze classical music works in high school. The program can then also create compositions that mimic a particular composer's style. His invention won the first prize at the International Science Fair in 1965. Kurzweil also receives an award from the Westinghouse Talent Search and is invited to the White House to be congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson. At the age of 16, he sings a piano piece he composed on his computer on the television show I Got a Secret.

In his second year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kurzweil designs a computer program to match high school students with eligible colleges. Kurzweil presents potential applicants with a 300-question survey and correlates their answers with thousands of details about the country's schools it associates in a large database. At the time, New England had only one computer with enough memory to run the database, but Kurzweil started a successful business to market the service: the Select College Consulting Program. At the age of 20, he sells the company to educational publishers Harcourt, Brace & World.

He graduated from MIT in 1970 with degrees in both computers and literature. Four years later, he founded Kurzweil Computer Products Inc, which developed a technology that allowed computers to read text printed in any regular font. The company pioneers a flatbed scanner and a text-to-speech synthesizer and uses all three inventions to build a reading machine for the blind. A casual conversation with a blind passenger on a plane trip inspired Kurzweil to build his OCR software as a reading machine for the blind. Completed in partnership with product development center Bell Labs, the Kurzweil Reading Machine made a splash when it was announced to the public at a press conference with the National Federation of the Blind in January 1976. Famous visually impaired musician Stevie Wonder buys it right away.

By the 1980s, musicians had advanced to the point where they could program their devices to play strings of almost unlimited length and complexity, but the sounds they produced were distinctly artificial and unsatisfactory for musicians and listeners accustomed to the rich sounds of acoustic instruments. Artist Stevie Wonder, a friend of Kurzweil, encourages him to his next invention. He asks Kurzweil to design a programmable synthesizer that can accurately mimic the sounds of keyboards, drums, and orchestral instruments. In 1982, Kurzweil establishes a new company called Kurzweil Music Systems to achieve this goal. At the same time, he establishes another company called Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (KAI) to develop computer speech recognition systems.

During these years of invention and productivity, Kurzweil paid little attention to his own health. In 1983, at the age of 35, he was diagnosed with glucose intolerance, a precursor to Type II diabetes and a major risk factor for heart disease. With the help of an agreeing doctor, Kurzweil radically changes his diet and exercise regimen and succeeds.

In 1984 Kurzweil Music Systems released its first instrument, the Kurzweil 250. Musicians are immediately struck by its ability to imitate the sounds of acoustic instruments. In blind tests, concert pianists cannot distinguish between Kurzweil's instrument and a grand piano. The instrument is adopted by many different genres of musicians. Many orchestral composers use them to test their creations in the studio before presenting their scores to a full orchestra. This fundamentally changes the way music is composed, performed, and recorded. Kurzweil, together with his other ventures, KAI, offers the first commercial speech recognition software in 1987. This breakthrough leads to the development of speech-activated voice mail systems, as well as dictation software that automatically converts the speaker's words into written text. Kurzweil sells the music systems company in 1990 but continues to serve as a consultant.

In 1990, he shared his vision of the future of technology in his book The Age of Intelligent Machines, which he wrote to the public. The well-received book contains a number of predictions about the development of information technology. In his book, he explores the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence, from its ancient philosophical and mathematical roots to the vibrant frontiers of today and the provocative visions of the 21st century.

In his 1993 book, The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life, he discusses his discoveries about diet and exercise and encourages readers to reduce fat consumption by no more than ten percent of total caloric intake. Kurzweil suggests that this diet, combined with moderate exercise and consumption of antioxidants, can virtually eliminate the risk of heart disease and many other ailments.

Kurzweil accurately predicts the rapid growth of the Internet in the 1990s; creates his own website, KurzweilCyberArt.Com. From here, AARON offers free computer programs to aid the creative process, including the visual art synthesizer and the Cybernetic Poet. On another site, KurzweilAI.net carries news and discussions about new developments in information technology.

In his 1998 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, optimistic and challenging, thought-provoking and engaging, Kurzweil relates the future of technology to the long-term phenomenon of human evolution; It almost becomes the ultimate guide on our way to the next century. In his book, he proposes a "Law of Acceleration," in which the rate of evolution and technical progress increase exponentially.

In 2001, he receives the half-million-dollar Lemelson-MIT Award for his lifetime of advancing technologies to help the disabled and enrich the arts.

In 2005 Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near, one of his most provocative books to date. The book, which aims to shed light on the present and the future, stands out with its determination in this period when technological progress is accelerating at a dizzying pace. The author gathers his findings under the concept of singularity.

Ray Kurzweil has been described by the Wall Street Journal as the "unstoppable genius" and by Forbes as the "perfect idea machine". Inc Magazine advertises itself as "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison," placing itself 8th among US entrepreneurs. PBS, on the other hand, describes itself as one of America's 16 revolutionaries of the last two centuries. In December 2012, Kurzweil is hired by Google co-founder Larry Page to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing." Larry Page and Kurzweil agree on a one-sentence job description: "Bringing natural language understanding to Google." Kurzweil receives a Grammy award on February 8, 2015, in recognition of his technical and creative achievements, especially the Kurzweil 250 music system.