Inventor, author Kurzweil to speak at Penn State

Centre Daily Times - Inventor and best-selling author Ray Kurzweil will speak at 8 p.m. Tuesday in Penn State’s Schwab Auditorium as part of the 2010-11 Student Programming Association Distinguished Speakers Series.

Kurzweil is the author of four national best-sellers including “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and “The Singularity is Near.” He is ranked No. 8 on Forbes Inc. magazine’s entrepreneurs and was named one of “16 Revolutionaries Who Made America” by PBS.

Among Kurzweil’s accomplishments is being the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition system and print-to-speech reading machine for the blind.