SIGGRAPH 2000: Keynotes

Overview:

The Human-Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of our Time in Virtual Reality in the 21st Century

Ray Kurzweil, author of “The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence” (Penguin, 1999) and recipient of a 1999 National Medal of Technology, delivered the SIGGRAPH 2000 keynote address. He has worked at the leading edge of artificial intelligence for more than 30 years, with firsts in speech and character recognition, optical scanning systems, music and speech synthesis, and automated investment decisions. His most recent work explores the potential of human-machine hybrids.

Immediately before the keynote address, SIGGRAPH presented the 2000 Computer Graphics Achievement Award to David H. Salesin, Microsoft Research and University of Washington, and the SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award to Thomas DeFanti, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Copper Frances Giloth, University of Massachusetts at Amherst