The Emerging Issue Forum was launched in 1985 by Governor James B. Hunt to focus attention on critical questions facing North Carolina. In order to put the ideas generated at the Forum into action, the NCSU Institute for Emerging Issues was established to connect people and resources from all areas of North Carolina to ensure the state’s future economic competitiveness. Every February, IEI’s Emerging Issues Forum attracts leaders in business, education and public policy to Raleigh to discuss a key challenge facing North Carolina. For more information, visit www.emergingissues.org.
Ray Kurzweil, noted innovator, inventor, and futurist, described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, will be the featured keynoter at the upcoming Emerging Issues Forum on February 9 and 10 at the Raleigh Convention Center.
At each year’s Forum, the Institute for Emerging Issues hosts state, national, and international experts to discuss an issue essential to North Carolina’s future economic competitiveness. This year’s thirtieth annual Forum, entitled “Innovation Reconstructed”, is expected to bring leaders from business, education, and policy to explore what North Carolina companies and communities must do to compete in a future of accelerating everything.
Kurzweil, a Director of Engineering at Google, is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. The author of five national bestsellers, his inventions in computer speech recognition and synthesized music continue to transform the relationship of human beings with technology.
Forbes, Inc. Magazine describes Kurzwell as “the ultimate thinking machine,” ranking him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States and calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” PBS selected him as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
Kurzweil 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, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
“As a land grant university, NC State is dedicated to the bringing public and private partners from North Carolina together,” said NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson. “I am proud to say that every year, the Emerging Issues Forum helps us fulfill this mission.”