Who is Ray Kurzweil?

In high school, Ray Kurzweil took the first step up the staircase of the rest of his future career by programming a computer to analyze patterns in musical compositions that were done by famous composers. The computer then composed a new song with the same style as the other pieces. The project is now known for having a computer do "pattern recognition". Kurzweil won 1st prize in the International Science Fair. 
He went on to attend MIT and began a small business that helped high school kids find the college best fitted to them. A computer with enough memory to hold 2 million facts on 3,000 colleges was rented for 1,000 an hour and Kurzwel would use it to match students up with specific colleges. Kurzweil then noticed how computers can really affect peoples' lives. He sold the company for over $100,000. 
His first real company was called Kurzweil Computer Products Inc. The company "taught" computers to recognize printed or typed characters in different fonts and printing quality. Before they could only recognize a few fonts. 
The company also developed a tool suggested by a blind man - Optical Character Recognition. OCR would read typed documents out loud.
In 1982 a new business,  Kurzweil Music Systems was created and the Kurzweil 250 was made which was "the first computer-based instrument that could realistically recreate the musical response of the grand piano or other orchestral instruments".
Kurzweil Applied Intelligence was created in 1982 as well to develop computer based speech recognition. 
In 1996, Kurzweil Educational Systems was created for print-to-speech reading technology. 
As you can see Kurzweil became very successful and ended up writing many books, including his best seller The Age of Spiritual Machines, on his doings. He has received multiple awards, prizes and recognitions and is still alive today.