Saturday, 15 December 2012
Ray Kurzweil joins Google as director of engineering
Posted on 01:26 by Maria Scott
Ray Kurzweil, the famed inventor and futurist, said today that he would join Google, starting Monday, to work on "some of the hardest problems in computer science."
Kurzweil's title will be director of engineering. In a long statement on his Web site, he said he would focus on machine learning and language processing:
"I've been interested in technology, and machine learning in
particular, for a long time: when I was 14, I designed software that
wrote original music, and later went on to invent the first
print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, among other inventions.
I've always worked to create practical systems that will make a
difference in people's lives, which is what excites me as an inventor.
"In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving
cars,
and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people
criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast-forward a decade --
Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking
questions of their
Android phones.
It's easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies
have always been around, but we're really on a remarkable trajectory of
quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this
development.
"I'm thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the
hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade's
'unrealistic' visions into reality."
Google confirmed the news and said Kurzweil's long history of invention would prove useful.
"Ray's contributions to science and technology, through research in
character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to
technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society,"
Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, said in a statement.
Norvig cited the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and
others for having words read aloud to them. "We appreciate his
ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to
problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we're working on
at Google."
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