Kurzweil to Deliver 2005 Commencement Address

Inventor, author, and futurist Raymond Kurzweil will deliver the address at WPI’s 137th commencement exercises on Saturday, May 21. His talk is titled “When Humans Transcend Biology.” He will also receive an honorary doctor of science degree.

Kurzweil, who was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, was the principal developer of a number of firsts—the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commer-cially marketed large-vocabulary speed recognition system. He has received numerous awards, including the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the 1994 Dickson Prize, Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the WPI Presidential Medal.

He is the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines (named Best Computer Science Book of 1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (published in nine languages and a former No. 1-ranked bestselling book on Amazon.com), and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, Sept. 2005). According to an Amazon.com preview, Kurzweil’s latest book portrays a human-machine civilization where our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality and where our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. His Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is the leading resource on artificial intelligence.

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Last modified: Apr 12, 2005, 08:32 EDT