Legally blind inventor Zuby Onwuta, meets Ray Kurzweil at #NFB18
Raymond Kurzweil is a phenomenal computer scientist, American inventor, and futurist. He is the principal inventor of a series of firsts such as text-to speech and optical character recognition (OCR). He is a recipient of the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation Award, and Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001. He has received twenty-one honorary doctorates and honors from 3 U.S. presidents. He was selected by PBS as one of 16 revolutionaries who made America. He is the co-Founder of Singularity University, a global community using exponential technologies to tackle the world’s biggest challenges and a director of engineering at Google.
National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is the only organization that supports blind people who have full capacity, and tries to help them achieve their dreams and live the life they want. Their leaders and members include blind people and their families and friends. Each year they hold a national convention having more than 3,000 delegates participating from all over the world.
At NFB 2018 in Orlando, Florida, Ray Kurzweil talked about human brain to brain communication and how this would help the blind. Imagine his surprise, after his speech, when I approached him, wearing a brain wave reader by Neurosky, and showed him a demo of “Think and Zoom Brain Control for Blind Assistive Tech”. He was impressed by my invention and expressed this with a delightful smile. I was overjoyed to have impressed a phenomenal inventor like Ray who invented text to speech (OCR) technology, then made it into a product for blind people, after an encounter with Kenneth Jernigan, a blind American and past president of National Federation of the Blind.
In this clip, Zuby demonstrates how to use Think and Zoom to magnify the words on a restaurant menu.
The author of this article, Zuby Onwuta is a legally blind innovator, US Army veteran, Disability Advocate at US Congress and patented inventor of Think and Zoom “Brain Control for Blind Assistive Tech”. More about him at ZubyOnwuta.com or connect via @ZubyOnwuta on Social Media.
