Dr. Kurzweil was a participant in Closer to Truth: 

Show 103, "What’s Creativity and Who’s Creative?"
Show 203, "How Does Creativity Work At Work?"
Show 206, "Why Do We Make Music & Art?"

Dr. Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of 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 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully founded, developed, and sold four AI businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, and reading technology.  All of these technologies continue today as market leaders.

Dr. Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony on March 14, 2000. He has received scores of other national and international awards. He is the recipient of the 1994 Dickson Prize, which is Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize, given to one individual each year. Since its inception in 1970, only one other person has received the Dickson Prize in the field of computer science. In 1990, Ray was voted Engineer of the Year by the over one million readers of Design News Magazine and received their third annual Technology Achievement Award. In 1988, he was named Inventor of the Year by MIT and the Boston Museum of Science. He was named Honorary Chairman for Innovation of the White House Conference on Small Business by President Reagan in 1986 and has received honors from Presidents Reagan and Johnson. He has received nine honorary Doctorates in science, engineering, music and humane letters from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Hofstra University and other leading colleges and universities. He has received the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machine. He has received seven national and international film awards including the CINE Golden Eagle Award and the Gold Medal for Science Education from the International Film and TV Festival of New York.  His book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was named Best Computer Science Book of 1990. His current best-selling book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, is published by Viking.

Please visit Dr. Kurzweil’s website to learn more:

http://www.kurzweiltech.com

Books

The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Viking / Penguin Books, 1999, Orion Books, 1999 (British Edition), Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1999 (German Edition), Allen & Unwin, 1999 (Australian Edition), Foreign editions in German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew

The Age of Intelligent Machines