Hiroaki Kitano is Chief Technology Fellow at Sony Group Corporation. Kitano served as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Executive Vice President of the company from April 2022 to March 2024 and as Chief Technology Officer and Executive Deputy President of the company from April 2024 to March 2025. He joined Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL) in 1993, serving as President and CEO of the company since 2011. In 2024, Kitano established the Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature as one of the Principal Founders.
As a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University from 1988 to 1994, Kitano built large-scale data-driven AI systems on massively parallel computers for which he received the Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). His research contributions continued at Sony CSL and at California Institute of Technology where his pioneering work defined the field of systems biology, which merges biology and systems science.
Outside of Sony, as an AI expert, Kitano is a professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School, a member of the OECD Expert Group on AI Futures, an advisor for Japan’s AI Strategy Council and AI Safety Institute (AISI) under Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan. He received the Nature Award for Creative Mentoring in Science in 2009 and was elected as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2021.
Kitano is the Founding President of the RoboCup Federation. He was an invited artist for La Biennale di Venezia (2000) and for the Workspheres exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art - New York (2001). Kitano proposed a new grand challenge "the Nobel Turing Challenge" aiming at the development of highly autonomous AI and robotics system for high-impact scientific discovery.