Sony AI Wins 2022 ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence

Tokyo, Japan — July 27, 2022 — Sony AI, established with the mission to unleash human imagination and creativity with artificial intelligence (AI), today announced that it has received the 2022 ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for its recent breakthrough in AI, Gran Turismo Sophy™ (GT Sophy). This honor was bestowed upon the company during the 31st Annual International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) from July 23-29, 2022 in Vienna, Austria.

Annually, the Industry Award for Excellence in AI is granted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGAI) to individuals or teams who have transferred original academic research into AI applications in recent years in ways that demonstrate the power of AI techniques. The projects must illustrate this through a combination of features, including the originality of the research novelty and technical excellence approach; the importance of AI techniques to the approach; and the actual or predicted societal impact of the application.

“We are honored to be recognized as the recipient of this year’s ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in AI for our recent breakthrough in AI, GT Sophy,” said Peter Wurman, Director, Sony AI America and the Project Lead on GT Sophy. “Since our founding, it has been our mission to enhance human imagination and creativity through AI. The GT Sophy project demonstrates the work in support of that mission by aiming to deliver new AI-powered gaming experiences to players around the world.”

GT Sophy is the first superhuman AI agent to outrace the world’s best drivers of the highly realistic PlayStation®4 racing simulation game, Gran Turismo™ (GT) Sport. The autonomous AI agent was trained utilizing a novel deep reinforcement learning platform developed in collaboration between Sony AI, Polyphony Digital Inc., and Sony Interactive Entertainment. GT Mastering the complex sport of race car driving in GT Sport was heralded as a new breakthrough in AI and was published in the February 10th, 2022 issue of Nature in an article titled Outracing Champion Gran Turismo Drivers with Deep Reinforcement Learning.

The full details on the GT Sophy project can be found at the Gran Turismo Sophy site.

About Sony AI
Sony AI Inc. was founded on April 1, 2020, with the mission to "unleash human imagination and creativity with AI." Sony AI aims to combine cutting edge research and development of artificial intelligence with Sony Group's imaging and sensing technology, robotics technology, and entertainment assets such as movies, music, and games to accelerate Sony’s transformation into an AI powered company and to create new business opportunities. To achieve this, Sony AI has launched four flagship projects to date aimed at the evolution and application of AI technology in the areas of Gaming, Imaging & Sensing, Gastronomy, and AI Ethics. For more information visit https://ai.sony.