Newsbriefs


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Raymond Kurzweil 
presents Friedberg Lecture
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     Raymond C. Kurzweil, a leading figure in applied artificial
intelligence and electronic music technology, will present the
third annual Sidney M. Friedberg Lecture in Music and Psychology
at 4 p.m. on April 27 in Levering Hall's Arellano Theater on the
Homewood campus.
     Kurzweil's presentation is titled "Turing's Prophecy:
Intelligent Technology in the 21st Century." Earlier, at noon on
April 27, Kurzweil will speak at the Peabody Institute in the
Friedberg Concert Hall at 1 E. Mount Vernon Place. His speech to
the Peabody community will be on music and technology in the 21st
century. Peabody student composers will also present new works
for ensembles consisting of traditional instruments and one of
Kurzweil's inventions, the Kurzweil K2000 synthesizer. Both
events are free and open to the public.
     Kurzweil, founder and chairman of Kurzweil Applied
Intelligence, has received nine honorary doctorates in science,
engineering, music and humane letters. He was the principal
developer in 1976 of the first omni-font optical character
recognition device, a device that can read characters printed in
any typeface, and the first print-to-speech reading machine for
the blind, the Kurzweil Reading Machine, also in 1976. His book
The Age of Intelligent Machines, published by MIT Press, received
the 1990 Most Outstanding Computer Science Book Award from the
Association of American Publishers.


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Former national poet 
laureate to give reading 
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     Noted poet and author Josephine Jacobsen will be the speaker
for the Writing Seminars' second Sunday Spring Reading at 2 p.m.,
April 30, in Mudd Hall on the Homewood campus.  An open reception
will be held after Jacobsen's reading. All are invited and
encouraged to attend.
     Jacobsen, 86, had her first poem published at age 11. She
has since published several collections of fiction and poetry,
including The Chinese Insomniacs and The Sisters. Her latest
collection of poetry, In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected
Poems, to be published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is
composed of 176 new and previously published poems. 
     From 1971 to 1973, she served two terms as consultant in
poetry to the Library of Congress, the position now titled
national poet laureate.
     "She's especially remarkable to me because she's
accomplished in both poetry and fiction," said Joyce Brown, a
lecturer in the Writing Seminars and a friend of Jacobsen's. "The
processes are very different."
     Jacobsen is internationally renowned and has received
numerous awards for her work. She won the Lenore-Marshall Award
for the best book of poetry for  The Sisters; On the Island:
Short Stories was nominated for the PEN-Faulkner Award. The New
York Times has noted Jacobsen's poetry for its "preference for
depth and precision."
     For more information about the Sunday reading, call
516-7563.