is a Japanese

scientist A scientist is a person who conducts Scientific method, scientific research to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, ...

. He is the head of th
Systems Biology Institute
(SBI); President and CEO of

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

Computer Science Laboratories; a Group Director of the Laboratory for Disease Systems Modeling at and RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences; and a professor at

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology The is a private, interdisciplinary graduate school located in Onna, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. The school offers a 5-year PhD program in Science. Over half of the faculty and students are recruited from outside Japan, and all education and r ...

(OIST). Kitano is known for developing

AIBO AIBO (''stylized aibo, Artificial Intelligence Robot'', homonymous with , "pal" or "partner" in Japanese) is a series of robotic dogs designed and manufactured by Sony. Sony announced a prototype Aibo in mid-1998, and the first consumer model wa ...

, and the robotic world cup tournament known as

Robocup RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded in 1996 by a group of university professors (including Hiroaki Kitano, Manuela M. Veloso, and Minoru Asada). The aim of the competition is to promote robotics and AI research by offer ...

Education

Kitano graduated from

International Christian University is a non-denominational private university located in Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan, commonly known as ICU. With the efforts of Prince Takamatsu, General Douglas MacArthur, and BOJ President Hisato Ichimada, ICU was established in 1949 as the first ...

with a

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

in physics in 1984. He received a PhD in computer science from

Kyoto University , mottoeng = Freedom of academic culture , established = , type = National university, Public (National) , endowment = ¥ 316 billion (2.4 1000000000 (number), billion USD) , faculty = 3,480 (Teaching Staff) , administrative_staff ...

in 1991. His PhD thesis in

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

was titled "Speech-to-speech translation: a massively parallel memory-based approach". His work includes a broad spectrum of publications in artificial intelligence and interactomics.

Research

From 1988 to 1994, Kitano was a visiting researcher at the Center for Machine Translation at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. At Sony, Kitano started the development of the

robotic pet. This research was developed further as the QRIO, a bipedal humanoid robot. The research behind AIBO and QRIO led to Kitano founding the

RoboCup RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded in 1996 by a group of university professors (including Hiroaki Kitano, Manuela M. Veloso, and Minoru Asada). The aim of the competition is to promote robotics and AI research by offer ...

annual international robotics competition in 1997. The goal of RoboCup is to create a team of autonomous robotic footballers that would be able to beat the best team in the world, by 2050. Kitano has made significant contributions to

Systems biology Systems biology is the computational modeling, computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems. It is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological syst ...

, including a contribution to the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML).

Roles and awards

Kitano has served as a scientific advisor for a number of companies, including

Alstom Alstom SA is a French multinational rolling stock manufacturer operating worldwide in rail transport markets, active in the fields of passenger transportation, signalling, and locomotives, with products including the AGV, TGV, Eurostar, Avelia ...

Segway The Segway is a two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter invented by Dean Kamen and brought to market in 2001 as the Segway HT, subsequently as the Segway PT, and manufactured by Segway Inc. ''HT'' is an initialism for "human transp ...

Japan and

Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings is a Japanese company formed in October 2005 from the merger of Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation and Mitsubishi Pharma Corporation. The company is based in Tokyo and is one of the core Mitsubishi companies. History On December 4, 2021, the compan ...

. He was awarded the

IJCAI Computers and Thought Award The IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is presented every two years by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), recognizing outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence. It was originally funded with royal ...

in 1993 and the

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

Award for Creative Mentoring in Science in 2009.

References

External links

ResearchMap profile

Biological Robustness
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kitano, Hiroaki 1961 births Living people Systems biologists Japanese bioinformaticians International Christian University alumni Kyoto University alumni Carnegie Mellon University faculty