Sony Computer Science Laboratory

• Country - France
• Town - Paris
• Web site - http://www.csl.sony.fr

Sony is an established consumer electronics manufacturer, supplying products and systems related to audio, video, broadcasting and more recently robotics. It devotes a substantial part of its turnover to research and development activities carried out by dedicated corporate research laboratories, active in the fields of components and audio visual technologies, telecommunications, multimedia information and data management systems. In addition to its expertise in electronics and information technologies, Sony now benefits from its ever increasing presence in the robotic domains through its subsidiary Sony Digital Creatures Lab, the creator of the successful dog robots Aibo, Latte, Macaron and of the SDR-3X Humanoid robot. Sony France more particularly houses a laboratory specialised in computer science, CSL, which conducts basic research in the field of neuroscience vision, language, music, and robotics. It has multiple computing platforms, which will include in the coming months a cluster of computers (~12 CPUs) for demanding, parallel computation. It also owns multiple robotic platforms for research, which should soon be extended by receiving the new SDR-3X II Humanoid Sony robot.

The Sony CSL laboratory has developed and accumulated expertise in theoretical neuroscience and computational models and their implementation in robots, of sensorimotor systems including the cerebellum, the vestibulo-ocular reflex, in reinforcement learning, in information and probability theory, and lately in deriving the structure of sensorimotor laws from sensorimotor experience alone. Sony France employs 2212 persons and has a budget of 2, 142, 618,930 Euros.

In the framework of the Network, a major contribution of SONY-CSL, although, not the only one, will be the theoretical development of multisensory-motor interactions, where the team has already acquired substantial experience in this domain. Another development will be the robotic implementation of the algorithms derived to verify the theoretical advances and their applicability. This work essentially enters within WP 7 Psychophysics of multisensory-motor interaction, will have strong collaborations with WP4 Fusing actions with vision and sounds and WP6 Psychophysics and cognition of haptic sensory-motor modality, within which channels of communication will be established with the relevant institutions.