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.

The program is comprised of two awards – the Faculty Innovation Award and the Focused Research Award. The awards create new opportunities for academics to engage in cutting-edge research leading to the introduction of breakthrough technologies.

The Faculty Innovation Award grants up to $100,000 USD to principal investigators for one year*2, for diverse research projects including AI, that may fall within three broad subject categories (Information Technology, Devices & Materials, and Biomedical & Life Sciences) relevant to Sony’s general research interests.

The Focused Research Award provides support for up to $150,000 USD for one year*2, to conduct research on themes more focused on Sony’s immediate areas of interest. There will be 12 themes this year, with many centering on content creation technology.

Sony will continue to advance research and development and promote innovation through partnerships with universities and research institutes around the world.

For more information about the awards, as well as the submission guidelines:

Sony Research Award Program Web Site

*1           European countries included in the program are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom.

*2           With the possibility of an extension.

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.”

Comment from the award recipient in 2021 and 2022: Professor Aaron Courville, University of Montreal (Canada)

“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.”