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From Wikipedia: Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech r
by michaelochurch 14y ago
From Wikipedia:
Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer[citation needed], the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
- tbatterii 14y agoyeah but... what has he done for me lately? /jokes
- mtgx 14y agoI think a lot of people just think of Ray Kurzweil as being like a "tech blogger" of the scientific community - someone who just likes to talk about future stuff, but not someone who's actually an inventor - which he is.
- fchollet 14y agoIt's important to note that none of these achievements are AI-related (apart from character recognition, but that's a terribly shallow form of AI). What's more, none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view, what's interesting are just the product ideas.
- michaelochurch 14y agoPeople who have the autonomy and backing to do "real AI" and have those kinds of achievements don't change jobs often. If someone has real accomplishments in AI, that person's going to be very hard to hire away, because quality jobs are rare. For all the hullabaloo, Director isn't that high at Google. He's not being hired as a VP (there are hundreds of those) or Google Fellow. It's not a bad gig, and I'm sure he'll get to work on interesting stuff, but I would have imagined a guy of his caliber getting more.
- CptCodeMonkey 14y ago> none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view It's the "first" part that somewhat matters more and then it become's a question of whether he's more Edison or Tesla ( crazy marketing or crazy smart). Also he's been put into a Director role, so his technical merits come second to his ability to find, understand, and cultivate the smart people needed for his department's goals.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoYeah, my impression is that the level of his title is fairly irrelevant. The whole thing is just to give him the ability to hire a team and have access to Google resources, from which they're hoping he'll produce something good.
- CptCodeMonkey 14y agoOne point in my life I worked for a third tier search engine provider with 160-210 million unqualified identities. Basic search term aggregation was illuminating. If Ray K. can go another step beyond statistical analysis, the results could be fascinating... or it could just be "People aren't wearing enough hats" of a let down. edit: identities, not impressions
- oh_sigh 14y agoWhat do you mean "from a technology point of view"? Perhaps it doesn't seem impressive to you because you've grown up in a world that takes these achievements for granted. Your statement is like saying calculus isn't an impressive mathematical achievement because any moderately competent math major in college could recreate it.
- anigbrowl 14y agonone of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view Well, not now.
- foobarqux 14y agoI don't know anything about the details of his contributions to those devices but I can't help but think that he is a charlatan whenever I see him speak; I would be interested in independent corroboration. He hasn't seemed to have made any progress on anything in the passed 10 years.