Tokyo, Japan— Sony Group Corporation (Sony) announced today that it will begin calling for research proposals for the Sony Research Award Program on July 15, 2024. The Sony Research Award Program is an open innovation program for universities and research institutions such as government research institutes and nonprofit organizations in the U.S., Canada, 17 European countries*1 and India. It provides sponsored research funding for projects on emerging and innovative technologies in collaboration with Sony Group’s own research groups. This year, the program will expand its research theme list in the areas of AI and content creation technology.
Comment from Hiroaki Kitano, Executive Deputy President and CTO, Sony Group Corporation “Sony’s Purpose is to ‘Fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology.’ Based on this purpose, Sony strives to develop technologies that unleashes the creativity of artists, engineers, scientists and all those who are working to build a better future filled with emotion (kando). To achieve this, embracing diversity and leveraging various technologies is essential. We believe that the Sony Research Award Program provides opportunities for collaborations between the Sony Group and academia and research organizations around the world to develop breakthrough technologies and innovations for the future.”
“In collaboration with researchers from Sony, my students and I are investigating the learning algorithms behind large language models to find ways to train them to be more efficient and give better performance. With Sony funding, we have also explored vision-and-language models that generalize robustly to new contexts — something with which prediction models often struggle. Through it all, Sony has been an excellent research partner and we have now extended our joint research project. In collaboration with Sony, we hope to advance AI, a technology that can be applied to a wide range of fields, and to contribute to society at large.”
