Takuya Kitazawa
About me
- M.S. in Information Science and Technology, specialized in recommender systems
- 6+ years of hands-on experience as a Software Engineer, OSS Developer, Data Scientist, and Machine Learning Engineer
- Developing consumer-facing web/mobile applications and their backend infrastructure
- Deploying ML solutions to an enterprise-grade big data analytics platform
- Wearing many hats in global teams, ranging from Technical Evangelist and Pre-Sales Engineer to Solution Architect and Product Manager, as a bilingual customer-centric product developer
02/2020 – Present
Senior Product Manager
Arm Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
04/2019 – 02/2020
Staff Engineer
Arm Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
- Mapped out granular IoT-data integrated use cases and solution ideas through customer-facing work with global teams.
- Developed a brand-new Python client tool for an enterprise big data analytics platform, and renovated the surrounding data science ecosystem from the product standpoint.
- Evangelized company's IoT and ML offerings, and enabled internal and external people to easily leverage them.
07/2018 – 03/2019
Senior Engineer
Arm Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
- Evangelized the connection of Big Data, ML, Data Science, and IoT.
- Worked closely with the internal sales engineering team to accomplish customer-facing ML opportunities in a wide variety of industries, including retail, gaming, and media.
02/2017 – 07/2018
Data Science Engineer
Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
(Acquired by Arm)
- Regularly contributed to the development of Apache Hivemall, a scalable ML library running on Apache Hive and Spark.
- Led the development of out-of-the-box ML applications from competitor analysis and product requirement documentation to system implementation and customer onboarding.
12/2016 – 01/2017
R&D Intern
Silver Egg Technology, Tokyo, Japan
Developed recommendation algorithms for customers' purchase data on a real-world e-commerce service.
08/2016 – 09/2016
Machine Learning Intern
Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
- Implemented an anomaly detection system for Datadog multiple metrics.
- Developed Hive UDFs for recommendation and anomaly detection.
10/2015 – 06/2016
Part-time Software Engineer
08/2015 – 09/2015
Software Engineering Intern
Rakuten Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
Worked on a real-world recommender system for a golf booking service.
02/2012 – 02/2013
Part-time Software Engineer
HANASAKE PICTURES, Fukushima, Japan
Developed PHP applications for a Japanese avatar-based social networking service, and an iOS application for virtual trial fitting using an image blending algorithm named Poisson Image Blending.
10/2011 – 03/2013
Research Assistant / Web Developer
The University of Aizu, Fukushima, Japan
Developed a web application "Aizu Weather" for regional weather monitoring. Implemented interactive geospatial data visualization with Ruby on Rails and D3.js.
Education
04/2015 – 03/2017
M.S. in Information Science and Technology
The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Thesis: Persistently Cold-Starting Online Item Recommendation for Implicit Feedback Data
Advisor: Dr. Takayasu Matsuo
GPA: 4.0
Activities:
- Served as a student volunteer at RecSys 2016 (Sep 2016)
- Participated in Machine Learning Summer School Kyoto 2015 (Aug 2015)
04/2011 – 03/2015
B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering
The University of Aizu, Fukushima, Japan
Thesis: User Modeling in Folksonomies: Relational Clustering and Tag Weighting
Advisor: Dr. Masahide Sugiyama
GPA: 3.97
Honors and Awards:
- President's Award — Summa Cum Laude equivalent (2015)
- Dean's List of Distinguished Students (2012 – 2015)
- Best Paper Prize, IEEE Sendai Section Student Awards (2014)
- Innovative Award, The Tokyo American Center and Keio SFC Entrepreneurship Seminar and Business Plan Competition (2012)
Activities:
- Served as a teaching assistant in a Numerical Analysis course, and thought Java coding of numerical methods to 20+ undergraduates (Fall 2014)
- Participated in Security and Programming Camp 2011 to deepen knowledge in web security (Aug 2011)