Hiroaki Kitano is Executive Deputy President and Chief Technology Officer of Sony Group Corporation, overseeing the R&D ecosystem across Sony`s diverse business domains including electronics, semiconductors, and entertainment. He concurrently serves as Representative Director and President, Sony Research Inc. and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. (Sony CSL). As an AI expert, Kitano also serves as a member of the UN AI Advisory Body, the OECD Expert Group on AI Futures, Singapore’s Advisory Council on the Ethical Use of AI and Data, the UK’s expert advisory panel for the International Scientific report on Advanced AI Safety, and Japan’s AI Strategy Council.

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. His research contributions continued at Sony CSL and at California Institute of Technology in the field of systems biology, merging biology and systems science. Kitano is the Founding President of the RoboCup Federation, served as president of IJCAI (2009-2011), and is 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).