We’re extremely honored and excited to announce this years introductory keynote speaker, Ray Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil is known as one of today’s leading inventors, as the 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, first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
Ray Kurzweil’s keynote presentation at this years SLCC will focus on the benefits of virtual environments and virtual reality in the terms of enabling communications with others and the blending between human and machine. His keynote speech will take place within Second Life and at the SLCC on Friday, August 14th at 9am PDT. For more information on Ray Kurzweill and his work, visit his website http://www.kurzweilai.net.
This is great news! Ray is a very fertile thinker AND creator, and his enthusiasm for immersive online environments is well known. It is great to see him also support SL.
Make also sure you don’t miss one of his latest initiatives, the Singularity Unviersity, which has just started its inaugural Graduate Studies Program course.
http://www.singularityu.org
(Full disclosure: I am Advisor & European Lead of the Singularity University)
Unclear here – is he avatar-only or personally on stage and broadcast into SL?
This sounds awesome!
As part of the goal of having Second Life be accessible for everyone, I would like to see Speech to Text added to the Max Assistive Technology that is in the virtual guidedog that reads SL chat aloud. At Helen Keller Day, people who were deaf were left out when people spoke extemporaneously in voice and the transcriber was not there or could not keep up.
I’m looking forward to the day when the speaker panel looks like this: http://www.ad-tech.com/chicago/adtech_chicago.aspx
Jeremy: Dude didn’t show. He sent his avatar. Rude.