He is the head of the Systems Biology Institute (SBI); Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Sony Group Corporation, Chief Executive Officer of Sony Research Inc. and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.;[2] a Group Director of the Laboratory for Disease Systems Modeling at and RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences; and a professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST).

His work includes a broad spectrum of publications in artificial intelligence and interactomics.

From 1988 to 1994, Kitano was a visiting researcher at the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie Mellon University.

[8][9] The research behind AIBO and QRIO led to Kitano founding the RoboCup annual international robotics competition in 1997.

[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] Kitano has served as a scientific advisor for a number of companies, including Alstom, Segway Japan and Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings.