Dr. Hiroaki Kitano has been Sony Group CTO since 2022 and works with R&D organizations across Sony Group companies from Entertainment, Electronics and Semiconductors to develop new technology that empowers artists and creators create new worlds.

Recently, in addition to AI driving productivity and creativity, Hiroaki Kitano sees the next frontier of AI in scientific discovery, where “AI Scientist” capable of making important scientific discoveries with a high degree of autonomy. In this talk Kitano will discuss how scientific discovery accompanied by technological breakthroughs have brought about revolutionary changes to our civilization over the years and how AI can accelerate such scientific research in the future.

We are entering a new stage where AI itself is beginning to autonomously make significant scientific discoveries, moving beyond being merely a tool in scientific research. Whether such AI will possess human-like intelligence or evolve into an entirely new form of intelligence represents a significant turning point in science.

Hiroaki Kitano is Executive Deputy President and Chief Technology Officer of Sony Group Corporation, overseeing the R&D ecosystem across Sony’s diverse business, including electronics, semiconductors, and entertainment. Additionally, he is President of Sony Research Inc. and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. (Sony CSL).

His work at Carnegie Mellon University to build large-scale data-driven AI systems on massively parallel computers led to The Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 1993. The quest continued at Sony CSL and at California Institute of Technology gave rise to the field of systems biology, merging biology and systems science.

Hiroaki Kitano is the Founding President of the RoboCup Federation, president of IJCAI (2009-2011), and a member of scientific advisory boards for numerous academic institutions, including the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and a professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School.

He is a recipient of the Nature Award for Creative Mentoring in Science in 2009 and a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Kitano was an invited artist for La Biennale di Venezia (2000) and for Workspheres exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – New York (2001).

3:45 pm  Doors open

4:00 pm  Welcome address
Edouard Bugnion
Vice President for Innovation and Impact, EPFL

4:05 pm  Campus Lecture “Creating the Engine for Scientific Discovery with AI”
Hiroaki Kitano
Executive Deputy President and Chief Technology Officer, Sony Group Corporation

4:45 pm  Q&A

Moderated by Mélissa Anchisi, AI Communications Manager, EPFL

5:00 pm  Aperitif and networking

6:00 pm  End of the event