Michael Spranger

Michael Spranger

I am Michael Spranger - the COO of Sony Research, the President of Sony AI, a Senior Researcher and Senior Program Manager at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc. and a Deputy General Manager at Sony Group based in Tokyo, Japan. I also co-direct the Innovation and Communication Science Lab at BellSystems24 Inc.

My research interest is to build creative, intelligent systems that learn autonomously in the real world. I am interested in both sensorimotor learning, the emergence of communication and foundations of AI.

My PhD thesis (ECCAI honorable mention award) has been published as an open access book.

You can find out more about me on Google Scholar, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, ORCID and Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc.

I do a lot of reviewing for journals, e.g. Cognitive Science, ALife, Adaptive Behavior, International Journal of Social Robotics, Constructions and Frames, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, IEEE TCDS, IEEE THRI and conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ALife, CogSci, IJCAI, AAAI, IROS, ECAL, CoNLL, ICDL-EPIROB, Evolang and others. I was/am part of the meta-review process (senior program committee or area chair) for conferences such as IJCAI, CogSci, IEEE ICDL-EPIROB.

I previously was an associate editor of IEEE TCDS and Cognitive Systems Research. I am the current co-chair of the IEEE Task Force on Language and Cognition.

I sometimes do art projects. A recent installation that combines my work on language evolution and robotics is called Das Fremde.

Please feel free to get in touch at [first name] . [lastname] @ gmail com.

Everything expressed on this page is my own view and does not necessarily represent the view of Sony, Sony AI Inc. or Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc.

Recent Activities

Invited participant at Shonan seminar on Natural Interaction with Humanoid Robots, Miura, Japan (2023/01, postponed due to COVID19 pandemic)
AI summit Seoul Keynote Speaker, Seoul Korea (2022/12)
AI world summit Keynote Speaker, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2022/10)
Co-organizer workshop SMILES Workshop: Sensorimotor Interaction, Language and Embodiment of Symbols at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB (2022/09)
Senior Program Committee member IJCAI-ECAI 2022 (ijcai-22.org) (2022/07)
Invited speaker 1st Workshop on Nobel Turing Challenge, online (2022/04)
Invited speaker Workshop on Intrinsically-Motivated Open-ended Learning (IMOL), Tuebingen, Germany (2022/04)
Invited panelist AI in Japan at European AI Week (2022/03)
Invited participant at Dagstuhl seminar on Representing and Solving Spatial Problems, Dagstuhl, Germany (2021/12, postponed due to COVID19 pandemic)
Topic editor Frontiers in Neurorobotics on Constructive Approach to Spatial Cognition in Intelligent Robotics (2021)
Topic editor Frontiers in Robotics and AI on Algorithms and Technologies towards Robotic Food Manipulation (2021)
Invited panelist at South Summit on Personalized Nutrition and AI (2021/10)
Program Committee Member NeSy workshop at International Joint Conference on Learning and Reasoning (2021/10)
Co-organizer AIxFood workshop at ACM Multimedia 2021 (2021/10)
Co-organizer workshop on New Horizons for Robot Learning: Closing the Innovation Loop at IROS 2021 (2021/10)
Program committee member Workshop on Data meets Applied Ontologies in XAI at Bratislava Knowledge September (BASK) 2021, Prague, Czech Republic (2021/09)
Invited panelist at PREDICTABLY UNPREDICTABLE at Wiener Festwochen (2021/09)
Co-organizer workshop SMILES Workshop: Sensorimotor Interaction, Language and Embodiment of Symbols at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB (2021/08)
Area Chair IJCAI-21 (2021/08)
Moderator 1st CARLA Monday (2021/07)
Invited talk DeepOntoNLP at ESWC (2021/06)
Paper accepted on abstract and episodic neurons in episodic Meta-RL at workshop on Learning to Learn ICLR 2021 (2021/05)
Invited talk SemDeep-6 at IJCAI 2020, Yokohama, Japan (2021/01, postponed due to COVID19 pandemic)
Co-organizer workshop on AIxFood at IJCAI 2020 (2021/01, postponed due to COVID19 pandemic))
Program committee member KR2ML at NeurIPS 2020 (2020/12)
Co-organizer workshop SMILES Workshop: Sensorimotor Interaction, Language and Embodiment of Symbols at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB (2020/11)
Program committee member CoNLL at EMNLP2020 (2020/11)
Program committee member Nesy2020 at IJCLR (2020/09)
Paper on hypothesis generation accepted at IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2020/08)
Program committee member Knowledge Graphs and E-commerce at KDD 2020 (2020/08)
Guest editor Special Issue on Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Mechanisms of Language Learning in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Developmental Systems (2020/06)
Keynote at Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference, Vienna, Austria (2020/05, virtual keynote)
Invited lecture on Embodied Symbol Emergence at Interdisciplinary College 2020, Guenne, Germany (2020/03, cancelled due to COVID19 pandemic)
Invited participant Workshop AI for scientific discovery workshop organized by at Alan Turing Institute, London, UK (2020/02)
Program committee member of AAAI 2020 (2020/02)
Talk and presentation at Madrid Fusion 2020 with Francois Chartier, Andoni Luis Aduriz (Mugaritz) and Romain Fornell (GOÛT ROUGE) (2020/01)
Program committee member of workshop on Knowledge Representation & Reasoning Meets Machine Learning (KR2ML) workshop at NeurIPS (2019/12)
Talk at NeurIPS Expo day on computational creativity for music and gastronomy, Vancouver, Canada (2019/12)
Talk at Sony Technology Exchange Fair (STEF) on computational creativity, Tokyo, Japan (2019/12)
Invited talk on Das Fremde at Art&Tech days Košice, Slovakia (2019/11)
Invited talk e-Ladda kickoff workshop, Trondheim, Norway (2019/11)
Program committee member of IROS 2019 Workshop on Deep Probabilistic Generative Models for Cognitive Architecture in Robotics (2019/11)
Invited talk at Shonan meeting From natural to artificial embodied intelligence: is Deep Learning the solution, Shonan, Japan (2019/11)
Invited talk at Workshop on Robotic Food Manipulation at Humanoids 2019 in Toronto, Canada (2019/10)
Invited talk at Smart Kitchen Summit 2019, Seattle, US (2019/10)
Abstract accepted at ICCV 2019 Workshop on Multi-Discipline Approach for Learning Concepts - Zero-Shot One-Shot Few-Shot and Beyond (2019/10)
PAI all partner meeting and ABOUT ML steering committee meeting, London, UK (2019/09)
Symposium organizer and speaker on BENCHMARKS FOR AGENT-BASED MODELS OF LANGUAGE EMERGENCE at Protolang 6 (2019/09)
Program committee member of IJCAI 2019 (2019/08)
Paper accepted on Neural-symbolic Reinforcement Learning at workshop NeSy19 (Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning) at IJCAI 2019, Macao/SAR, CN (2019/08)
Industry day talk for Sony at IJCAI 2019, Macao/SAR, CN (2019/08)
Program committee member of CogVis-2019 at CogSys (2019/08)
Program committee member of Semdeep-5 at IJCAI 2019 (2019/08)
Program committee member of NeSy19 (Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning) at IJCAI 2019 (2019/08)
Invited talk workshop on Applications of Personal Robotics for Interaction and Learning (APRIL) at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2019, Oslo, Norway (2019/08)
Co-organizer workshop on language learning at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2019, Oslo, Norway (2019/08)
Associate Editor IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2019 (2019/08)
Paper accepted on reservoir computing for grounded language grounding at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2019, Oslo, Norway (2019/08)
Program committee member of IEA/AEI 2019 (2019/07)
Program committee member (meta-reviewer) of Cogsci 2019 (2019/07)
Invited talk on AI and robot art at Gamma Festival, St Petersburg, Russia (2019/07)
Invited talk + panel Japan Media Art Festival and Mutek , Tokyo, Japan (2019/06)
Invited talk at Shonan meeting on Language as goal-directed, sequential behavior (2019/05)
Paper on sensorimotor learning accepted at IEEE ICRA 2019, Montreal, Canada (2019/05)
Program committee member of Workshop on Cognitive Architectures for HRI: Embodied Models of Situated Natural Language Interactions (MM-Cog) at AAMAS 2019 (2019/05)
Invited talk at CrossRoads #1, Tokyo, Japan (2019/05)
Invited participant Partnership on AI workshop on "Positive Futures from AI", San Francisco, US (2019/05)
Speaker AI Summit on AI, Sony and Creativity, Tokyo, Japan (2019/04)
Panel on CSL 30th anniversary at Sony HQ Tokyo, JP (2019/03)
Invited talk on language learning and emergence at JST-CREST / IEEE-RAS Spring School on "Social and Artificial Intelligence for User-Friendly Robots", Shonan, Japan (2019/03)
AIxFood panel discussion at Sony at SXSW, Austin, TX, US (2019/03)
Das Fremde art installation at Sony at SXSW, Austin, TX, US // press release CSL // press release Sony (2019/03)
Guest Editor Frontiers Research Topic on Language and Robotics (2019/03)
Co-organizer Shonan meeting on Learning to communicate, Shonan, Japan (2019/02)
Associate editor for IEEE TCDS (2019/01)
Paper accepted at Art Machines: International Symposium on Computational Media Art (ISCMA) on Das Fremde, Hong Kong, China (2019/01)
Paper accepted at NIPS/NeurIPS workshop on Emergent Communication, Montreal, Canada (2018/12)
Participant for Sony at Partnership for AI meeting in San Francisco, US (2018/11)
Participant at re:think food meeting in Napa Valley, US (2018/11)
Invited speaker at International Conference on Digital Creativity at Mutek JP Tokyo, Japan (2018/11)
Paper accepted in Special issue on AI, Art and Aesthetics at JSAI Journal of Artificial Intelligence on Das Fremde (2018/11)
Co-organizer workshop on Language and Robotics at IROS 2018 Madrid, Spain (2018/10)
Co-author paper on sensorimotor learning accepted at IROS 2018 Madrid, Spain (2018/10)
Invited talk on learning to communicate at Workshop on active vision, attention and learning at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB, Tokyo, Japan (2018/09)
Associate editor (meta-reviewer) of IEiEE ICDL-EPIROB 2018, Tokyo, Japan (2018/09)
Session chair language learning at IEiEE ICDL-EPIROB 2018, Tokyo, Japan (2018/09)
Co-organizer symposium on From fieldwork to modelling: Explaining the variability of linguistic spatial referencing system at ICSC 2018, Rome, Italy (2018/09)
Co-presenter abstract on causal models in spatial reference studies at ICSC 2018, Rome, Italy (2018/09)
Program committee member of SemDeep-3 at COLING 2018 (2018/08)
Program committee Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions at COLING 2018 (2018/08)
Program committee member of Nesy18 workshop at HLAI (2018/08)
Co-author paper on constraint-based machine learning accepted at Nesy18 workshop at HLAI (2018/08)
Invited lecture on concept grounding in robots at Summer School Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application (CARLA) in Osnabrueck, Germany (2018/08)
Invited talk on language and gesture learning in robots at Workshop on “Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application" (CARLA) in Osnabrueck, Germany (2018/08)
Co-organizer Joint Workshop on Sharing Autonomy in Human-Robot Interaction at IJCAI/ECAI 2018, Stockholm, Sweden (2018/07)
Co-organizer tutorial on neural-symbolic computing at IJCAI/ECAI 2018, Stockholm, Sweden (2018/07)
Program committee member of IJCAI/ECAI 2018 (2018/07)
Co-organizer tutorial on neural-symbolic computing at IJCNN/WCCI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2018/07)
Program committee member of ALIFE 2018 (2018/07)
Co-organizer EVOSLACE: Workshop on the emergence and evolution of social learning, communication, language and culture in natural and artificial agents at ALIFE 2018, Tokyo, Japan (2018/07)
Das Fremde wins jury selection price Japan Media Art Festival (2018/07)
Program committee member of NAACL-HLT 2018 (2018/06)
Guest editorial board Special Issue on Semantic Deep Learning in Semantic Web Journal (2018)
Program committee member of Latent Semantics for the Web (LSW) at ACM WWW'18 (2018/04)
Invited speaker at Dommune radio about AI+Art with Refik Anadol and Ryota Kanai (2018/04)
Invited speaker at 17th AI Art and Aesthetics Research Meeting "AI-Aesthetics-Art" on 1 April (Sun) at Bigakko Tokyo Japan (2018/04)
Das Fremde and invited talk at Sónar+D in Hong Kong (2018/03)
Co-organizer and speaker at Symposium Cognitive Computation Symposium: Thinking Beyond Deep Learning at City, University of London, London, UK (2018/02)
Program committee member (meta-reviewer) of Cogsci 2018 (2018/02)
Invited talk at LangRobo seminar on symbol emergence (2018/01)
NIPS 2017 Long Beach, US for PAI meeting / Sony (2017/12)
Das Fremde at Gwangju Media Art Festival in Gwangju, Korea (2017/12)
Das Fremde at Artificial Intelligence Art and Aesthetics exhibition presented at OIST, Okinawa, Japan (2017-11 / 2018-01)
Invited talk symposium "Meaning/Meaningless and Language" as part of Artificial Intelligence Art and Aesthetics exhibition, OIST, Okinawa, Japan (2017/11)
Das Fremde at Gotenyama Art+Technology Week (2017/11, interview)
Program committee member of Hybrid Statistical Semantic Understanding and Emerging Semantics (HSSUES) at ISWC 2017 (2017/10)
Program committee member of European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2017) (2017/09)
Program committee member of WINKS workshop at JOWO 2017 (2017/09)
Workshop on language learning at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2017 (2017/09)
Paper on language learning and tutoring at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2017 (2017/09)
Program committee member of SemDeep-2 at IWCS (2017/09)
Paper on automated pathway curation accepted at ACL BioNLP (2017/08)
Program committee member of Workshop on Grounded Language Understanding (GLU 2017) Satellite of Interspeech 2017 (2017/08)
Program committee member (meta reviewer) of CogSci 2017 (2017/07)
Program committee member of IEA/AEI 2017 (2017/06)
Invited participant Dagstuhl seminar on Human-like Neural-Symbolic Computing (2017/05)
Invited participant Ernst Strüngmann Forum on Interactive Task Learning (2017/05)
Invited participant Lorentz Center workshop on Perspectives on Developmental Robotics (2017/05)
Program committee member of SemDeep workshop at ESWC 2017 (2017/05)
Method Course on Language Learning with Robots at Interdisciplinary College, Guenne, Germany (2017/03)
Paper accepted at AAAI spring school on Computational Construction Grammar (2017/03)
Invited to specialist meeting about Universals and Variation in Spatial Referencing across Cultures and Languages in Santa Barbara, US (2016/12)
Installation Das Fremde in Lausanne (Switzerland) at Les Urbaines (2016/11)
Installation Das Fremde in Zurich (Switzerland) at the week long Us&Them (2016/11)
Giving a talk and demo on the language research at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc. at Sony CSL Paris Open House in Paris, France (2016/10)
Invited talk on construction learning at the annual meeting of the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association (2016/09)
Co-organizer Workshop on Language Learning at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB (2016/09)
ATLANTIS Atelier on multi-modal grounded language learning at CAES summer school(2016/09) - this atelier won the best technical atelier price
Paper on automated pathway curation accepted at ACL BioNLP (2016/08)
Guest editor Special section on Computational Models in Language Acquisition published in Interaction Studies (2016/08)
Guest editor Special issue on Cognitive Robotics in Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (2016/08)
Paper on robust language processing accepted at IJCAI-16 (2016/07)
Invited Workshop at 2016 UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference on Synthetic Models of Language Evolution (2016/07)
Casparo Performance at ICCC 2016 Paris, France (2016/06)
Invited talk and participation at APRIL ITN Paris Workshop on Foundations in Personal Robotics (2016/05)
Associate partner in the APRIL project (Applications of Personal Robotics for Interaction and Learning) a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Industrial Doctorate Innovative Training Network (2016)
Invited lecture at the 2nd ESSENCE summer school on Evolutionary Semantics (2015/08)
Attended a workshop at University of Southern California on Action, Vision and Language and their Brain Mechanisms in Evolutionary Relationship (2015/08)
Paper on incremental learning accepted at RSS Workshop on Model Learning for Human-Robot control (2015/07)
New paper on Natural Language semantics for robots accepted at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2015(2015/06)
New paper on SBML/BioPAX conversion accepted at BioNLP Workshop at ACL 2015(2015/06)
Website is up for the tutorial on Evolutionary Semantics at IJCAI'15 (2015/06)
New paper on language learning accepted at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2015 (2015/05)
Invited member of IEEE AMD Language and Cognition Task Force (2015/04)
Paper on language learning accepted at IJCAI-15 (2015/04)
Abstract on Ontogenetic Ritualization accepted at Protolang 4 in Rome, Italy (2015/04)
Poster on Ontogenetic Ritualization wins poster prize at Tokyo Lectures In Language Evolution (2015/04)
Workshop on Cognitive Robotics accepted at 2015 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS) (read more)
Invited lecture at Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2015 on robots and language evolution (2015/03, read more)
Tutorial on Grounded Language Processing accepted for International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2015/01)
Paper presentation at International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics (ISAROB) on Robot Models of the Cultural Evolution of Language (2015/01)
Invited talk and participation at CITEC-ABLE workshop on Construction Grammar (2014/12)
CASPARO opera performance in Leuven (Belgium) as part of the Vesalius year (2014/12)
Organizer special track on Cognitive Robotics at PRICAI 2014 (2014/12, read more ...)
Reviewer for Artificial Life Journal (2014/11)
Paper presentation at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2014 on Ontogenetic Ritualization (2014/10)
Invited talk at CogRob 2014 (ECAI 2014) on Evolution of Natural Language Semantics (2014/08)
Reviewer for PRICAI 2014 (2014/08)
Reviewer for IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2014 (2014/07)
Reviewer for International Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems (2014/06)
Reviewer for Adaptive Behavior (2014/05)
Paper presentation at 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language EvolangX (2014/04)
Workshop presentation at the workshop on Grammaticalization at 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language EvolangX (2014/03)
Invited participation and talks at Dagstuhl Seminar on Spatial reference in the Semantic Web and in Robotics (2014/03)
Reviewer for CogSci 2014 (2014/03)
Attended IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (2013/11)
Official move from Sony's ITDD R&D division to Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc. (2013/10)
Invited seminar on Evolutionary semantics at Institut de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et de Développements en Intelligence Artificielle (2013/10)
Invited talk workshop on Language Development and Robots at University of Amsterdam (2013/10)
Invited lecture and atelier on Computational Cognitive Semantics at the international Summerschool on Agent-based Models of Creativity (2013/09)
Organizer workshop on Collective Behaviors and Social Dynamics at 12th European Conference on Artificial Life (2013/09)
Paper presentation on spatial language evolution at 12th European Conference on Artificial Life (2013/09)
Paper presentation on spatial language learning at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2013 (2013/08)
Paper presentation 27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence on Evolutionary semantics (2013/07)
Reviewer for IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (2013/04)
Reviewer for CogSci 2013 (2013/03)
Invited course lecturer on Computational Cognitive Semantics at Bangor Summer School on Cognitive Linguistics (2013/07)
CASPARO opera performance in Tokyo (Japan) as part of 25 years Sony Computer Science Laboratories (2014/05)
CASPARO opera performance in Brussels (Belgium) as part of 50 years A.I. lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (2014/05, see here for a video)
Seminar on Evolutionary Semantics at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology HKUST (2013/03)
Journal paper on evolving spatial language strategies published in Springer's Künstliche Intelligenz (2013/01)
Reviewer for 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2012/11)
ECCAI honorable mention best PhD in 2011 at ECAI 2014 (2012/08)
Papers published in Springer book on Language Grounding in Robots (2012/07)
Papers published in John Benjamin book on Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution (2012/07)
Paper published in Springer LNCS New Directions in Logic, Language, and Computation(2012/06)
Paper published in John Benjamin book on Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar (2011)

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