(February 19, 2008) World-recognized inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, visited the SEAT Center on February 14 prior to his scheduled presentation at Braden Auditorium as part of the Sesquicentennial Series celebration. The SEAT Center is the only assistive technology center in the U.S. aligned with an undergraduate curriculum, and is one of the three targeted priorities for the College of Education over the next several years.
Kurzweil was presented with an overview of the teaching, research, and service activities of the Center by Phil Parette, director of the SEAT Center and Kara Peters Endowed Chair. The presentation emphasized assistive technology (AT) innovation reflected in the curriculum of the Department of Special Education. Kurzweil exhibited particular interest in how his inventions were integrated into the curriculum, and commended the Center on its efforts to provide AT training to thousands of students enrolled in the College of Education.
As noted by the inventor, the integration of readily available technologies, including advanced cell phone technologies, open source software, and other technology tools is increasingly important in education given the exponential growth of technology innovations. Kurzweil expressed support of the SEAT Center's array of activities, and indicated that he hoped that a 'dialogue' between himself and the Center would be maintained in the future.
Ray Kurzweil is widely regarded as one of the leading inventors of our time. 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.
© 2008 Illinois State University • An equal opportunity/affirmative action university encouraging diversity • Privacy Statement • Contact Us • Check COE faculty and staff e-mail
