Ray Kurzweil, described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes, will be the keynote speaker at SC06, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, date storage and analysis. Under the theme "Powerful Beyond Imagination," SC06 will be held November 11-17, 2006, in Tampa, Florida.

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.

"Ray Kurzweil’s visionary thinking — and his ability to take his ideas from thought to reality — make him an ideal speaker to open SC06, which is as much a marketplace of new ideas as it is a showcase for new computing and networking technologies," said SC06 General Chair Barbara Horner-Miller. "Ray’s work embodies our theme of ‘Powerful Beyond Imagination’."

Among Kurzweil's many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. More information about his accomplishments can be found on his Web site at http://www.kurzweilai.net

Kurzweil has written five books, four of which have been national best sellers. “The Age of Spiritual Machines” has been translated into nine languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon.com in science. His latest book, “The Singularity is Near,” which went into its fourth printing after two months, was the fourth best-selling science book of 2005, according to Amazon.com.

Kurzweil’s keynote address will open the SC06 Technical Program on Tuesday, November 14, in the Tampa Convention Center. In it he will explain how the paradigm shift rate is doubling every decade, so the twenty-first century will see 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate. Computation, communication, biological technologies (for example, DNA sequencing), brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year.

Conference registration is now open and early discounts are available until October 15. Register on line at http://registration.expoexchange.com/showsig062/

SC06 is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (ACM SIGARCH). For more information, see http://sc06.supercomp.org/