Predictions Series 2022: AiThority Interview with Peter Stone, Executive Director at Sony AI

A pivotal moment in my early career as a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University was when I saw a demonstration of the first soccer-playing robots in the summer of 1994. They were from Alan Mackworth's lab at the University of British Columbia, and I became immediately inspired to try to understand the intelligence required to play soccer. At the time, most AI researchers were focused on much more abstract planning tasks, or short-time-duration skills for individual robots. I saw the opportunity to use the game of soccer to, for the first time, investigate new methods for enabling collaborative (with teammates) and adversarial (against opponents) multi-robot planning in relatively complex domains. It so happened that one of the few other people in the world at the time who was thinking about robot soccer as a challenge domain for AI was Hiroaki Kitano at Sony (currently the CTO of Sony and CEO of Sony AI).