Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition (OCR), 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 system. Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence.  All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray’s Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation’s largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has also received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University’s top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received fifteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and international film awards. Ray’s books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Four of Ray’s books have been national best sellers and The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon science. Ray Kurzweil’s new book, published by Viking Press, is entitled The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology.

Dan Shapira

Dan serves as the principal outside corporate counsel to one of the nation’s largest private companies. He is frequently retained by companies to consult on intricate commercial transactions and confidential internal investigations. He has litigated numerous complex commercial cases in the areas of antitrust, securities fraud, insurance and labor.

Recently he served as counsel for a group of corporate and individual defendants in the Phar-Mor Securities Litigation which was comprised of 40 consolidated suits involving hundreds of millions of dollars in the Western District of Pennsylvania. He is also frequently the lead negotiator of labor contracts for large companies. Dan has represented both plaintiffs and defendants in significant personal injury litigation. He also has successfully defended individuals and companies charged with white-collar offenses.

From 1972 to 1974, Dan served as a Deputy Attorney General and head of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. Subsequently, he served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania from 1974 to 1979 and was appointed the Chief of the White Collar Crime Division. During his tenure in the United States Attorneys Office, he was recipient of the Department of Justice Outstanding Performance and Special Achievement Awards and received commendations from the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a result of his successful prosecution of several sensitive, high-profile corruption cases.

Dan has also served as an instructor at the National School of Trial Advocacy.

Hans Moravec

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Scott Friedman

Chairman

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