Dr. Hiroaki Kitano’s Vision Behind a New Grand Challenge is Published in Nature’s Npj Systems Biology and Applications Journal
Life at Sony AI
June 21, 2021
A paper by Dr. Hiroaki Kitano, CEO of Sony AI Inc., entitled, “Nobel Turing Challenge: Creating the Engine for Scientific Discovery,” has been published in npj Systems Biology and Applications, part of the prestigious Nature Portfolio.
Dr. Kitano’s paper discusses the Nobel Turning Challenge, which aims to develop a highly autonomous AI system that can perform top-level science, indistinguishable from the quality of that performed by the best human scientists today, where some of the discoveries may be worthy of Nobel Prize level recognition and beyond.
“Understanding, reformulating, and accelerating the process of scientific discovery is critical in solving problems we are facing and exploring in the future and therefore one of the most important endeavors,” said Dr. Kitano. “This research aims to create an alternative form of science that will break the limitation of current scientific practice largely hampered by human cognitive limitation and sociological constraints. It could give rise to a human-AI hybrid form of science that could transform many areas of science and technology including systems biology.”
This paper builds upon his previous publication about this challenge (Kitano, AI Magazine, 2016).
About the npj journals
Launched in 2014, the npj journals, which are part of the prestigious Nature Portfolio, collaborate with preeminent scientists and global partners to publish high-quality open access research. npj Systems Biology and Application is an open access, multi- and interdisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing the highest quality papers on systems biology, including network biology, application of control theory to biological systems, computational modeling and analysis, comprehensive and/or high-content measurements, theoretical, analytical, and computational studies of system-level properties of biological systems and computational/software/data platforms enabling such studies.
Dr. Hiroaki Kitano
Sony AI, CEO
Dr. Hiroaki Kitano is CEO of Sony AI Inc. Additionally, he is Executive Vice President and Officer in charge for AI Collaboration for Sony Corporation and CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. He also serves as the director of Sony Global Education. He is the Founding President of the RoboCup Federation, a recipient of The Computers and Thought Award in 1993 and Nature Award for Creative Mentoring in Science (Mid-carrier award) in 2009. He has served as the president of International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (2009-2011) and has served as a member of scientific advisory boards for numerous academic institutions including European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He currently serves as a professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School. Most recently he was named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2021).
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