Keynote Speakers
Ray Kurzweil
Keynote Speaker
Panelist – Appearing via virtual connection
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and 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 inventor 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 two 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 U.S. presidents.
Ray has written seven books, five of which have been national best sellers. The Singularity is Near and Ray’s latest book How to Create a Mind have been New York Times Bestsellers.
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Marvin Minsky
Keynote Speaker
Panelist
Professor of Media Arts & Science
Professor of E.E.C.S, MIT
Marvin Minsky has made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. His conception of human intellectual structure and function is presented in two books: The Emotion Machine and The Society of Mind (which is also the title of the course he teaches at MIT).
He received the BA and PhD in mathematics at Harvard (1950) and Princeton (1954). In 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator. His other inventions include mechanical arms, hands and other robotic devices, the Confocal Scanning Microscope, the “Muse” synthesizer for musical variations (with E. Fredkin), and one of the first LOGO “turtles”. A member of the NAS, NAE and Argentine NAS, he has received the ACM Turing Award, the MIT Killian Award, the Japan Prize, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the Rank Prize and the Robert Wood Prize for Optoelectronics, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal.
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Steve Mann
Keynote Speaker
Panelist
ISTAS’13 General Chair
Tenured Professor, University of Toronto, Canada
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Faculty of Arts and Science, and Faculty of Forestry
Mann holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD in Media Arts and Sciences ’97) and McMaster University, where he was also inducted into the McMaster University Alumni Hall of Fame, Alumni Gallery, 2004, in recognition of his career as an inventor and teacher. While at MIT, in then Director Nicholas Negroponte’s words he “brought the seed” that founded the Wearable Computing group in the Media Lab.
In 2004 he was named the recipient of the 2004 Leonardo Award for Excellence for his article “Existential Technology,” published in Leonardo 36:1.
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Gordon Bell
Keynote Speaker
ISTAS’13 Banquet Dinner
Principal Researcher
Microsoft
Gordon is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft working on lifelogging, having spent 23 years at Digital Equipment Corporation as Vice President of R&D, where he was responsible for the first mini- and time-sharing computers and the development of DEC’s VAX.
As the first, NSF Ass’t Director for Computing (CISE), he led the National Research and Education Network panel that became the Internet, and was an author of the High Performance Computer and Communications Initiative. Bell is the author of books and papers on computer architecture, startup companies, and lifelogging.
He is a member or Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Association of Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science, the Australia Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and received The 1991 National Medal of Technology.
He is a founding trustee of the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.
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