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SONY AI Leadership

Orchestrating Focused AI Research

Our leaders combine global expertise with a shared mission to empower creators and solve the world’s most complex challenges.

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Engineering the Extraordinary

At Sony AI, we believe the most profound breakthroughs happen at the intersection of advanced science and limitless imagination. Our mission is to build an environment where the world’s most ambitious researchers have the freedom, the tools, and the future-focused mindset to redefine the future of intelligence.

Since the beginning, we've prioritized deep research over short-term trends. As leaders, we're proud to give complete autonomy to our research teams to pursue new advancements in the world of artificial intelligence, transforming bold theoretical insights into tangible, real-world advancements that inspire creators worldwide. 

Michael Spranger

How Sony AI's Values Are Driving the Future of AI

A Message from Michael Spranger, President of Sony AI

"The flagship projects that Sony Al carries out in gaming, imaging & sensing and ethics, as well as the large potential of Al projects in Sony around music, movies, and electronics, are what really makes Sony Al stand out in the global Al research and development landscape. Sony Al is the only place where Al researchers can focus on their research, while being able to work very closely with creators in such interdisciplinary fields."

Read Michael's Full Message

Meet the Leadership Team

Shaping the future of AI through research, innovation, and ethical scientific pursuit.

Michael Spranger

President

Peter Stone

Chief Scientist

Pete Wurman

Deputy President

Peter Dürr

Lead Engineer

Yuki Mitsufuji

Lead Research Scientist

Alice Xiang

Lead Research Scientist

Meet the researchers leading Sony AI’s scientific discovery.

Meet Our Research Team

Discover how our research is making a global impact.

Explore Our Global Impact

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Michael Spranger

Michael Spranger

President

Michael Spranger is the President of Sony AI, Sony’s strategic research and development organization established in April 2020. Sony AI’s mission is to “unleash human imagination and creativity with AI.”

Michael is a roboticist by training with extensive research experience in fields such as Natural Language Processing, robotics, and foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Michael has published more than 70 papers at top AI conferences such as IJCAI, NeurIPS and others. Concurrent to Sony AI, Michael also holds a Senior Researcher position at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., and is actively contributing to Sony’s overall AI ethics strategy.
Peter Stone

Peter Stone

Chief Scientist

Peter is the Chief Scientist of Sony AI. He is also the founder and director of the Learning Agents Research Group (LARG) within the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, as well as Department Chair and Founding Director of Texas Robotics.

In 2013 he was awarded the University of Texas System Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award and in 2014 he was inducted into the UT Austin Academy of Distinguished Teachers, earning him the title of University Distinguished Teaching Professor. Professor Stone's research interests in Artificial Intelligence include machine learning (especially reinforcement learning), multiagent systems, and robotics.

Professor Stone received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1998 from Carnegie Mellon University. From 1999 to 2002 he was a Senior Technical Staff Member in the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department at AT&T Labs - Research. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, AAAI Fellow, IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and 2004 ONR Young Investigator. In 2007 he received the prestigious IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, given biannually to the top AI researcher under the age of 35, and in 2016 he was awarded the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, and in 2024 he was awarded the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award.
Pete Wurman-2

Pete Wurman

Deputy President

Pete received his undergraduate degree from MIT in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He spent 6 years as a professor at North Carolina State University before leaving in 2004 to help co-found Kiva Systems, the company that pioneered mobile robots in warehousing. Kiva was acquired by Amazon in 2012 and has deployed hundreds of thousands of robots to Amazon warehouses around the world. For their invention, Pete and his co-founders were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022. While at Amazon, Pete also founded the Amazon Picking Challenge. Pete has over 50 academic papers and 60 patents, and is an IEEE Fellow and AAAI Fellow.

In Pete's Words:

“Throughout my career, I've chased challenges at the intersection of AI and real-world applications. For the last 15 years, I've enjoyed building amazing teams of talented people. I take pride in creating a work environment that is fun, productive, and inclusive. At Sony AI, we've hired a fantastic team and are well on our way to building a world-class industrial AI research lab.”
Peter Dürr

Peter Dürr

Lead Engineer

Peter is the director of Sony AI in Zürich. After joining Sony in 2011, he worked on computer vision, AI and robotics research in various assignments at Sony R&D Center and Aerosense Inc. in Tokyo, at Sony R&D Center Europe, and recently Sony AI in Zürich. Peter holds master's degrees in mechanical engineering and management from ETH in Zürich, as well as a PhD in computer and communication science from EPFL in Lausanne.

In Peter's Words:

“By deeply integrating sensor technology, machine learning, and robotics, we aim at enabling novel applications of AI to unleash human imagination and creativity.”
Yuhki_Mitsufuji

Yuki Mitsufuji

Lead Research Scientist

Dr. Yuki Mitsufuji is a Lead Research Scientist and the VP of AI Research at Sony AI, as well as a Distinguished Engineer at Sony Group Corporation. He earned his PhD in Information Science & Technology from the University of Tokyo. At Sony, he leads the Creative AI Lab and the Music Foundation Model Team, focusing on advancing AI applications in music and sound, contributing to projects like music restoration and soundtrack enhancement.His earlier works in sound separation, including the restoration of Glenn Gould's recordings and the soundtrack of Lawrence of Arabia, have been highly influential in the field. He has also made significant contributions to real-time sound generation technologies. Most recently, he developed MMAudio, a framework for creating high-quality and synchronized audio from video and text inputs.He is an IEEE Senior Member and serves as an associate editor for one of IEEE's prestigious journals. He has also conducted tutorials on diffusion models for audio at ICASSP 2025 and ISMIR 2024. In addition to his role at Sony, he was a specially appointed associate professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 2022 to 2025, where he lectured on generative models. He has published numerous papers in top venues such as CVPR, ICLR, NeurIPS, and ICML
Alice Xiang

Alice Xiang

Lead Research Scientist

Alice Xiang is the Global Head of AI Ethics at Sony. As the VP leading AI ethics initiatives across Sony Group, she manages the team responsible for conducting AI ethics assessments across Sony's business units and implementing Sony's AI Ethics Guidelines. In addition, as the Lead Research Scientist for AI ethics at Sony AI, Alice leads a lab of AI researchers working on cutting-edge research to enable the development of more responsible AI solutions. Alice also recently served as a General Chair for the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), the premier multidisciplinary research conference on these topics.

Alice previously served on the leadership team of the Partnership on AI. As the Head of Fairness, Transparency, and Accountability Research, she led a team of interdisciplinary researchers and a portfolio of multi-stakeholder research initiatives. She also served as a Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua University’s Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, where she taught a course on Algorithmic Fairness, Causal Inference, and the Law.

She has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, MIT Tech Review, Fortune, Yahoo Finance, and VentureBeat, among others. She has given guest lectures at the Simons Institute at Berkeley, USC, Harvard, SNU Law School, among other universities. Her research has been published in top machine learning conferences, journals, and law reviews.

Alice is both a lawyer and statistician, with experience developing machine learning models and serving as legal counsel for technology companies. Alice holds a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, a Master’s in Development Economics from Oxford, a Master’s in Statistics from Harvard, and a Bachelor’s in Economics from Harvard.

In Alice's Words:

“Our AI Ethics research team conducts cutting-edge research on fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI. Our projects aim to enable the development of more ethical AI within Sony and also to contribute to the global research discourse around AI ethics. Our goal is to make Sony a global leader in AI ethics.”