Noted inventor and author Ray Kurzweil to speak here Wednesday

Noted inventor and author Ray Kurzweil to speak here Wednesday

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist and author who has been recognized by three U.S. presidents for his contributions to science and technology, will speak at 5:45 p.m. Wednesday, July 12, in the auditorium of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center on the St. Paul campus of the University of St. Thomas.

The talk, and a 7 p.m. reception, are part of a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Graduate Programs in Software, which now is part of the College of Business.

The event is open to St. Thomas graduate business and software students, faculty and alumni. Those attending are asked to R.S.V.P. to gradsoftware@stthomas.edu. For more information about the talk, see https://www.stthomas.edu/cob/events/default.html. More information about Kurzweil can be found at https://www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html.

Ray Kurzweil

Kurzweil, called the “greatest thinker on artificial intelligence” by Bill Gates, will discuss virtual technology, molecular computing, cybernetics, nanorobots and other developments in technology.

Kurzweil was the first to invent such devices at the flatbed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine, and text-to-speech synthesizer.

His six books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and, most recently, The Singularity is Near.