Tokyo, Japan— Sony Group Corporation (Sony) announced today that it is now accepting submissions for its Sony Research Award Program, currently in its seventh year. The program provides funding for projects researching emerging and innovative technologies in collaboration with Sony's own research groups, and is open to universities and, starting this year, to other research institutions such as government research institutes and nonprofit organizations. The program is offered in the U.S., Canada, 17 European countries*1 and India.

"Through the Sony Research Award Program, we have been working with universities around the world to promote research and development that will lead to new innovations and cutting-edge technologies," said Hisashi Tamai, President, R&D Center and Senior Vice President, Sony Group Corporation. "Since the establishment of the program in 2016, we have expanded the regions covered by the program from North America to Europe and India. We expect that this year's addition of research institutions other than universities provides opportunities for us to collaborate with a broader pool of talented researchers in the coming year."

The Sony Research Award 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 research projects that may fall within three broad subject categories (Information Technology, Devices & Materials, and Biomedical & Life Sciences) relevant to Sony's current research interests.

The Focused Research Award provides support for up to $150,000 USD for one year*2, to conduct research more focused in the areas of Sony's immediate interest.

"Working with Sony has been incredibly valuable for us," said Professor Virginia de Sa, University of California San Diego. "Brainstorming about the utility of various candidate biologically motivated architectural additions, such as lateral and feedback connections, has helped us to identify and focus on specific inductive priors that entail strong functional advantages for computer vision tasks, particularly in semantic segmentation. Our work with Sony has also helped focus our algorithm tests on specific application areas that are most relevant to real-world applications."

"It has been an honor to be funded and do research in collaboration with Sony for the past three years," said Assistant Professor Dimitris Papailiopoulos, University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The support and feedback from Sony have been very fruitful for my research group. Our collaboration has propelled our projects forward to tackle the many challenges of machine learning when deployed at a large scale. Our Sony colleagues helped us calibrate our research towards important and practical problems and steered us towards exciting new avenues."

"Collaborating with Sony for the past several years has been an amazing experience", said Associate Professor Daniel Sanchez of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Sony researchers have been eager to work on transformative computer architectures, sharing their challenges in accelerating important applications and adopting our ideas and prototypes to address these challenges. This collaboration has provided us with invaluable insights about real-world problems, and enabled technology transfer and impact that would not have been possible otherwise."

For more information about the awards, as well as a list of previous award recipients, please visit Sony Group Portal - Sony Research Award Program.

• *1European countries included in the program are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.
• *2With the possibility of an extension.