This follows the METI Minister’s Award (Partnership of Venture Businesses and Large Enterprises) that PFN was jointly awarded with FANUC Corporation at the third Nippon Venture Awards program in 2017.

About Nippon Venture Awards

The Nippon Venture Awards program aims to honor outstanding entrepreneurs and venture businesses for their creation of new businesses with positive impacts on society, as role models for young people and entrepreneurs who will play key roles in the next generation. This awards program was launched in 2014 with the aim of raising both public awareness of the importance of embarking on challenging business and public recognition of entrepreneurs, thereby encouraging people throughout the country to take on new challenges. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, and Japan Open Innovation Council as well as METI call for venture businesses in a wide range of industries to participate in the program. Then, a review committee of business organizations and experts assesses applications and selects the winner of each award.

The Prime Minister’s Award, which PFN was presented with at the fifth commendation ceremony, is given to a start-up company that is rated as doing the most novel or innovative business as well as having the greatest business vision, such as solving social problems and advancing to the global market, among participating venture companies.

METI news release

https://www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2019/0523_001.html

Comments from PFN President and CEO Toru Nishikawa

“It is a great honor to receive the Prime Minister’s Award of the fifth Nippon Venture Awards program, and I feel strongly encouraged to work even harder. Since we founded PFN in 2014, we have been engaged in autonomous driving, intelligent industrial robots and machine tools, early diagnosis of cancer, and many other challenges facing our world, with the aim of realizing practical applications of deep learning and other cutting-edge technologies as quickly as possible. Moving forward, PFN will not only strive to realize our plan to develop a practical personal robot that will do housework for people but also expand the domain of our deep learning applications to other fields including sports analytics and creativity. We are determined to redouble our efforts to develop such novel and socially useful technology.”

The photo of the commendation ceremony held at the Prime Minister’s Office on May 23, 2019

PFN President and CEO Nishikawa receives the award certificate from Prime Minister Abe in his official residence.

PFN demonstrated a fully autonomous tidying-up robot system by having the robot hand a tomato toy to Prime Minister Abe. （From left: Prime Minister Abe, Nishikawa, Okanohara）

（From left: Nishikawa, Okanohara, Igarashi, Unno, Hatori）

Commemorative photo of PFN members taken at the end of the commendation ceremony （From left: Igarashi, Hatori, Hasegawa, Nishikawa, Unno, Okanohara）

投稿 Prime Minister’s Award at the fifth Nippon Venture Awards は Preferred Networks, Inc. に最初に表示されました。

At the award ceremony (from left, Sosuke Kobayashi, Jun Hatori, skipping one person, Kuniyuki Takahashi, and Wilson Ko)

After the ceremony (from left, Sosuke Kobayashi, Jun Hatori, Kuniyuki Takahashi, and Wilson Ko)

At PFN, we are applying the latest Image processing and natural language processing technologies as a means of communication between humans and robots. Our latest work has succeeded in building an interactive system in which you can use unconstrained spoken language instructions to operate a common object picking task.

PFN will continue to research and develop the cutting-edge technology and promote its application to the industry.

The details of the PFN’s paper “Interactively Picking Real-World Objects with Unconstrained Spoken Language Instructions” and video are available on the following website.

https://pfnet.github.io/interactive-robot/

投稿 Preferred Networks received the Best Paper Award on Human-Robot Interaction in ICRA 2018. は Preferred Networks, Inc. に最初に表示されました。

Chainer, an open source deep learning framework, won the award this year, in the recognition of its dynamic and flexible neural network definition by “define-by-run”.

Chainer is evaluated for the award as follows:
Chainer strives to “bridge the gap between algorithms and deep learning implementations” in its flexible and intuitive Python-based framework for neural networks. Chainer was the first framework to provide the “define-by-run” neural network definition which allows for dynamic changes in the network. Since flexibility is a significant part of the foundations of Chainer, the framework allows for customization that similar platforms do not so easily provide and supports computations on either CPUs or GPUs.

https://opendatascience.com/odsc-east-2018-open-source-data-science-project-award-winner-the-chainer-framework/

About the Open Data Science Conference (ODSC)

ODSC is a conference for people to connect with the data science community and contribute to the open source applications they use every day. Its goal is to bring together the global data science community to help foster the exchange of innovative ideas and encourage the growth of open source software.

About the Chainer Open Source Deep Learning Framework

Chainer is a Python-based deep learning framework developed mainly by PFN, which has unique features and powerful performance that allow for designing complex neural networks easily and intuitively, thanks to its “Define-by-Run” approach. Since it was open-sourced in June 2015, as one of the most popular frameworks, Chainer has attracted not only the academic community but also many industrial users who need a flexible framework to harness the power of deep learning in their research and real-world applications.
Chainer incorporates the results of the latest deep learning research. With additional packages such as ChainerMN (distributed learning), ChainerRL (reinforcement learning), ChainerCV (computer vision) and through the support of Chainer development partner companies, PFN aims to promote the most advanced research and development activities of researchers and practitioners in each field. （http://chainer.org/)

投稿 Chainer awarded the Open Source Data Science Project Award Winner at ODSC East 2018 は Preferred Networks, Inc. に最初に表示されました。

, an

The Japan Media Arts Festival publicly honors highly creative, artistic works in four fields of media arts: Art, Entertainment, Animation, and Manga. The annual festival was first organized in 1997 and has since recognized and awarded outstanding works. This year, it has received 4,192 entries from 98 countries and regions around the world, the most in its history, and has announced a grand prize winner, four excellence award winners, and three new face award winners in each of the four categories.

PaintsChainer has drawn a huge reaction on Twitter and other social media sites the moment it was released in January 2017 as a free online service that colors black and white sketches automatically. It uses a deep learning technology to recognize faces, clothing, and other background objects on an uploaded sketch image or picture, and color them automatically or based on a specified color. Currently, it provides three different coloring models Tanpopo, Satsuki, and Canna.

https://paintschainer.preferred.tech/index_en.html

The jury cites the significance of providing an automatic coloring platform as a free web service as the main reason for giving the Excellence Award to PaintsChainer.

A commemorative photo of award winners taken at the press conference at the National Art Center, Tokyo. The fourth person from the left in the middle row is Taizan Yonetsuji.

PaintsChainer was developed by one of PFN engineers Taizan Yonetsuji, who has commented as follows:

It all started as my personal project, so I could also study deep learning. I feel very honored to receive such an award and am truly grateful to my senior colleagues who have taught me about deep learning, everyone at Preferred Networks who has supported the launch and operation of the service, and all the users who have said PaintsChainer was fun and enjoyed using it. We will make PaintsChainer even greater while continuing to take on other new challenges.

● Summary

•  Award： Excellence Award, Entertainment Division
•  Work： PaintsChainer
•  Creator：YONETSUJI Taizan
• http://festival.j-mediaarts.jp/en/award/entertainment/

● 21st Japan Media Arts Festival Exhibition of Award-winning Works

All the award-winning works that represent the media arts of the modern times will be shown to the public during the exhibition, which also includes symposia, artists’ talks, workshops, and other related events.

•    Venue：     The National Art Center, Tokyo (Roppongi)
•    Period：    Wednesday, June 13 – Sunday, June 24, 2018
• http://festival.j-mediaarts.jp/en/exhibit/outline/

※PaintsChainer is the registered trademark of Preferred Networks, Inc. in Japan and other countries. Other company names and product names written in this release are the trademarks or the registered trademarks of each company.

投稿 Preferred Networks’ automatic coloring service PaintsChainer receives the Excellence Award at the 21st Japan Media Arts Festival は Preferred Networks, Inc. に最初に表示されました。

 Receiving 2017 Emerging Leader Award (Japan) with Dr. Richard Dasher, Director, Stanford US-Asia Technology Management Center and Hiroshi Maruyama, Chief strategy officer of PFN.

Preferred Networks, Inc. was selected as the “2017 Emerging Leader Award”, the winner of the 2017 Japan-U.S. Innovation Award held at Stanford University on Friday, July 28th. PFN was one of the “Innovation ShowCase” start-up companies in 2016, and the rapid growth in the past year was highly appreciated.

US-Japan Innovation Awards is operated by the Japan Society of Northern California in collaboration with the Stanford University US–Asia Technology Management Center.

“Emerging Leader Awards” are presented to young, dynamic, and growing, entrepreneurial companies founded upon innovations that are demonstrating impressive success and that have the potential to make substantial global impacts. One U.S. and one Japanese award recipients are selected each year through a rigorous process guided by a distinguished 40-person Innovation Advisory Council composed of venture capitalists, academic experts, and prominent business executives based in Japan and in San Francisco/Silicon Valley.

投稿 Preferred Networks recieved the “Emerging Leader Award” at the 2017 Japan-U.S. Innovation Award は Preferred Networks, Inc. に最初に表示されました。