Stephen William Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018) was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge at the time of his death. He was the Lucasion professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009.

At 22, Hawking contracted Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) also referred to as Motor Neurosis. It is a degenerative disease that leads to the death of neutrons in a person's brain. It causes muscle twitching and a deterioration of muscles which leads to difficulty in swallowing, talking and eventually breathing.

Professor Stephen Hawking received thirteen honorary degrees. He was awarded CBE (1982), Companion of Honour (1989) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009). He was the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes, most notably the Fundamental Physics prize (2013), Copley Medal (2006) and the Wolf Foundation prize (1988). He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. 

A character is selected by moving the cheek to stop the cursor. The cheek movement is detected by an infrared switch that is mounted on the spectacles. This switch is the only interface with the computer. ACAT includes a word prediction algorithm provided by SwiftKey, which predicts the whole word when the first couple of characters are selected. When a full sentence has been built, it is send to the speech synthesizer. A separate hardware synthesizer, made by Speech Plus is used. 

Through ACAT mouse can be controlled in Windows. It can used to check email using Microsoft Outlook, surf the internet using Firefox, or write lectures using Microsoft Word.