Dr. Hiroaki Kitano, an adjunct professor at OIST, will be one of the members of the High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence launched on October 26 by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to examine how AI should be governed.
The Body is expected to play a unique role in making AI work for humanity, with its global, interdisciplinary, and gender-balanced membership consisting of 38 experts from 33 countries from various fields, including government, the private sector, research and academia, and civil society organizations, as well as one permanent member from the UN Secretariat. It is expected to play a unique role in helping AI work for humanity.
Some of the activities of the Body include building a global scientific consensus on risks and challenges, exploring ways to use AI for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and strengthening international cooperation on AI governance.
Professor Kitano joined OIST's predecessor, the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology Promotion Corporation, in 2009 as a Principal Investigator. Since then, as a professor (adjunct) at OIST, he has led various cross-disciplinary projects, including the MANTA project, which uses AI and robotics to automate the comprehensive analysis of intestinal bacteria and genomes, and the sustainable living experiments project, an industry-academia collaborative research project. Professor Kitano is currently Senior Executive Vice President and CTO of Sony Group Corporation, as well as President and CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc., Representative Director and CEO, Sony Research Inc., President of the Systems Biology Institute, and Chair of the Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Network. Since May 2023, he also serves as the member of the AI Strategy Council convened by the Japanese government.
In response to his appointment to the United Nations High-level Advisory Body on AI, Professor Kitano said that "The development of AI-related technologies will further accelerate the pace of progress and will have an unprecedented impact on us. At OIST, we are pursuing a project to develop ‘AI scientists’ that will be able to make scientific discoveries in a highly autonomous manner and fundamentally change the way science is conducted. We are now entering a new industrial revolution. Proper development and governance of impactful technologies, including the realization of such AI systems, will be crucial. It is very significant that the United Nations has established a body for this, and I believe that it is an honor and a great responsibility to be one of the members and to be appointed as a Co-chair of one of its working groups. I hope I can contribute to the proper development of AI technology."
