Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been announced as the 2008 Game Developers Conference keynote speaker, where he will prognosticate on what the next 20 years holds for gaming.
SAN FRANCISCO-Jan. 3, 2008-Celebrated inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil will deliver a keynote address at the 2008 Game Developers Conference (GDC) inspiring attendees to take a dramatic look at the future of games and electronic entertainment. Described as "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison" by Inc magazine and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes, Kurzweil is uniquely positioned to speak to the GDC audience about the next two decades of videogames and what the landscape may well look like come GDC 2028. GDC, the world's largest industry-only event dedicated to the advancement of interactive entertainment, returns to the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco for a week of networking, learning, and inspiration February 18-22, 2008. Complete details and registration for the conference are available now at www.gdconf.com.
"Bringing the future to life today has always been at the heart of the game industry, so it's essential to have our vision refreshed by one of our greatest living thinkers," said Jamil Moledina, executive director of the Game Developers Conference. "As a technology inventor and prophetic visionary, Ray Kurzweil is that rare individual who can inspire the next evolutionary step forward in what games can do."
Ray Kurzweil has repeatedly been recognized as an intellectual pioneer by some of the most respected American media sources. He was 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 him 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, Kurzweil was the principal developer 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.
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