Kurzweil Wins MIT Prize

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Raymond Kurzweil, inventor of
the first reading machine for blind people, has received the $500,000
Lemelson-MIT prize. Kurzweil has pioneered pattern recognition, artificial
intelligence, and speech reading technologies. He will donate a porton of the
prize to a foundation for blind students; the rest will fund his research. 

http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/01LMP.html