288 Authors Raymond Kurzweil, Ph.D. http://www.KurzweilAI.net Raymond Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition technology, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner and the first commercially marketed large- vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music syn- thesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art. In  1999,  Kurzweil  received  the  US  National  Medal  of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology. João Pedro de Magalhães, Ph.D.   http://senescence.info/ Microbiologist, research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School, Lipper Center for Computational Genetics, Boston, USA.  His  work  on  the  biology  of  aging  relates  to  cellular senescence,  the  telomeres,  stress-response  mechanisms,  and Werner’s syndrome. Dr. Magalhães develops computational approaches  aimed  at  understanding  aging  from  a  genomic perspective. Marvin Minsky, Ph.D. http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Profes- sor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has led to both theoretical and practical advances in artificial intel- ligence,  cognitive  psychology,  neural  networks,  and  the theory of Turing Machines and recursive functions. Profes-