Google Hires Renowned Futurist Ray Kurzweil
Google Hires Renowned Futurist Ray Kurzweil
Renowned futurist, social scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil will join Google as its director of engineering. Google has not officially confirmed Kurzweil's appointment but the inventor made an announcement of this recent development on his own blog.
Mr. Kurzweil said that he would be working on machine learning and language processing projects in his new role at Google. In the 1970s and 80s, his scope of his work spanned software development, scanning technologies, text-to-speech synthesization and digital music. In more recent years, he has garnered greater fame as an author of books that explored the frontiers of technological and medical possibilities.
He is also credited with pioneering Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology with his invention of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which was the first device to transform print into synthesized speech, enabling blind and visually impaired people to read printed materials. The innovator said that he is thrilled to be working with Google on "...some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s 'unrealistic' visions into reality.".
(Source: PCMag, Forbes, Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, Invent Now)