Renowned author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil will keynote Kodak’s Global Directions 2013 conference - an annual technology and educational event sponsored by the company’s document capture and enterprise software business unit.

The conference, scheduled for September 22-25 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Washington, D.C., USA, will explore “Intelligent Information Management” and how its deployment provides businesses with a competitive advantage.

This year’s theme includes topics on the importance of collaboration platforms for enterprise-wide information management, managing social media as a vital information stream, and the next generation of software that not only manipulates and stores vast amounts of data but can also intelligently process the valuable information contained within it.

Kurzweil is uniquely qualified to discuss new approaches to information management. He was recently named Director of Engineering at Google and is widely regarded as one of the greatest inventors of our time. He was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition (OCR), the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first CCD flat-bed scanner. PBS honored Kurzweil as one of “16 Revolutionaries Who Made America”, Forbes magazine has referred to him as “the ultimate thinking machine” and Inc. magazine described him as “the rightful heir to Thomas Edison.”

“Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer of our industry,” said Dolores Kruchten, President, Document Imaging and Vice President, Eastman Kodak Company. “Without his contributions, we might not be having this conference. Ray is the perfect headliner for a blockbuster lineup of speakers and exhibitors.”

Business leaders attend Global Directions to examine solutions to critical issues affecting their organizations. The conference agenda features cutting-edge case studies, end user presentations and technology demonstrations. Notable attendees include some of the most renowned thought leaders, analysts and journalists in the information management industry.

The event is designed to advance education, knowledge and actionable business strategies in the application of information management to meet the future needs of the global business community. Topics range from extracting business content from scanned paper documents, to document processing workflows for enterprise platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, to high performance software that can understand, classify, extract and automate data flows from a variety of input sources such as documents, voice mail and social media.

Steve Fox, Microsoft Director , author and Azure Evangelist, Microsoft will outline Microsoft’s moves to place every tool that you’re using into the “sky” to drive greater collaboration.

Steve is the author of several books about SharePoint and Windows Azure. As the Director of Microsoft’s Azure business unit, he leads a team of cloud architects and developers to help drive enterprise solution development and migration into the cloud.

To learn more about the Global Directions 2013 conference agenda and registration, visit www.globaldirections2013.com