Ray Kurzweil is a world class inventor, thinker, and futurist with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions. He has been a leading developer in artificial intelligence for 61 years – longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievement in music technology, he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates. He has written five best-selling books including "The Singularity Is Near" and "How To Create A Mind," both New York Times best sellers, and "Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine," winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. His new book, "The Singularity Is Nearer" was released on June 25th and debuted at #4 on the New York Times Best Seller list. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.