Conference News -- Keynote Speakers

Ray Kurzweil

founder, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.

Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine, which ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, 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’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.

Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the US Patent Office.

He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three Ray has written six books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

Michael Rogers

founder, Practical Futurist
author, journalist, and futurist; formerly, Futurist-in-Residence, The New York Times, New York, New York

One of the nation's leading experts on the impact of technology on business and society, Michael Rogers is an interactive media pioneer, novelist and journalist, formerly Futurist-in-Residence for the New York Times Company.

For ten years he was vice president of The Washington Post Company's new media division, helping guide both the newspaper and its sister publication Newsweek into the new century, as well as serving as editor and general manager of Newsweek.com. Now his New York-based consultancy, Practical Futurist, works with both startups and major media companies. Rogers is also a best-selling novelist whose fiction explores the human impact of technology. His five books have been published worldwide, optioned for film and television, and chosen by the Book of the Month Club.