MIT announced yesterday that Raymond Kurzweil was the winner of the $500,000 Lemelson Prize for 2001. Wired has a nice overview article about Kurzweil. For those who aren't familiar with him, Kurzweil has helped develop, among other things, the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first CCD flatbed scanner, and, of course, a variety of music synthesizers. He is also the author of several books on artificial intelligence.