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September 22, 2008 - Lance Allred and Mrs. Tana Allred
101 Foster Auditorium 9-12pm (subject to change)Lance Allred is the first legally deaf player in NBA history with a 75-80% hearing loss. He played with the Idaho Stampede in the NBA Development League for the 2006-07 season. In 38 games (all starts) with the Stampede, Allred averaged 16.2 points and 10.0 rebounds in 29.6 minutes per game. The 6-foot-11, 250-pound center was named to the 2008 D-League’s Red All-Star Team and was also the winner of the D-League’s Dream Factory Friday night inaugural game of H.O.R.S.E.
On March 13, 2008, the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers signed Allred to a ten-day contract. On March 25, 2008, the Cavaliers signed Allred to a second ten-day contract. On April 4, Allred was signed for the remainder of the 2008 season.
October 27, 2008 - Abraham Nemeth
101 Foster Auditorium 9-12pm
Abraham Nemeth (1918-) is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at University of Detroit Mercy in Detroit, Michigan. He was hired in 1955 and retired in 1985. Since then, Nemeth has remained very active. He served on the Research and Development Committee of the National Federation of the Blind, through which he worked on a program which converts a computer with a speech synthesizer into a talking scientific calculator.He was the chairman of the Michigan Commission for the Blind from 1991 until 1993. In 1999 he received the Migel Medal, awarded by the American Foundation for the blind. In 2001 he received the Creative Use of Braille Award from the American Printing House for the Blind. The Division of Visual Impairments of the Council for Exceptional Children awarded him the Exemplary Advocate Award.
He is well known as the creator of the Nemeth Code for Mathematics and Science Notation. In 1952, this unique and revolutionary idea became the standard mathematics code for the blind and visually impaired in the United States, and later Canada and New Zealand.
November 10, 2008 - Ray Kurzweil
Video Conference in 508 Rider Building II 9-10:30am
Ray Kurzweil has been described as a "restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
He was the principal developer of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, 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 has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray's Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.
Along with leaders of the National Federation of the Blind, Ray announced the Kurzweil Reading Machine in 1976, In 1978, Kurzweil Computer Products introduced a commercial version of the Kurzweil OCR, which was used by Lexis Nexis to upload paper legal and news documents onto its online databases.