Takuya Kitazawa
- 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 machine learning solutions to an enterprise 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.
Work
10/2020 – Present
Senior Product Manager
Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
In the context of machine learning and data science for enterprise marketing data, I'm currently responsible for translating client's business needs into technical problems and building data-driven solutions on top of our data visualization & analytics capability.
02/2020 – 09/2020
Senior Product Manager
04/2019 – 02/2020
Staff Engineer
07/2018 – 03/2019
Senior Engineer
Arm, Tokyo, Japan
(Spin-off Treasure Data as an independent organization)
As an engineer:
- Evangelized the connection of big data, machine learning, data science, and IoT, both internally and externally.
- Worked closely with an internal sales engineering team and served as a data science consultant to accomplish customer-facing machine learning projects in a wide variety of industries, including retail, gaming, and online media.
- Represented individual contributors in Arm's data business division, and mapped out granular IoT-data integrated use cases and solution ideas through customer-facing work with global teams.
- Led the development of a brand-new Python client tool for an enterprise big data analytics platform, and renovated the surrounding data science ecosystem from the product standpoint.
As a product manager:
- Worked with multi-regional cross-functional teams, and continuously delivered marketer-facing features in an enterprise customer data management platform by bridging the communications among internal/external and technical/non-technical stakeholders.
- I was particularly responsible for product development and strategy establishment in the applied machine learning and customer data analytics domain, and we have successfully recognized as "Strong Performer" in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q3 2020.
- Led a collaborative project with Arm Research, an Arm's internal research-oriented group, and published a novel solution template for data-driven multi-touch attribution.
02/2017 – 07/2018
Data Science Engineer
Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
(Acquired by Arm)
- Regularly contributed to the development of Apache Hivemall, a scalable machine learning library running on Apache Hive and Spark.
- Led the development of out-of-the-box machine learning applications from competitor analysis and requirement gathering to system implementation and customer onboarding.
12/2016 – 01/2017
R&D Intern
Silver Egg Technology, Tokyo, Japan
Conducted in-depth data analysis on customer's purchase data collected from a real-world e-commerce service, and applied a novel recommendation algorithm, which has been proposed as a part of my master's thesis, that resolves unique problems associated with the characteristics of data.
08/2016 – 09/2016
Machine Learning Intern
Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan
Contributed to the development of Apache Hivemall, an open-sourced large-scale machine learning toolkit, by implementing user-defined functions (UDFs) for state-of-the-art recommendation and anomaly detection techniques.
Led the PoC implementation of a next-generation anomaly detection system for multiple metrics, collected from an enterprise big data management platform.
10/2015 – 06/2016
Part-time Software Engineer
08/2015 – 09/2015
Software Engineering Intern
Rakuten Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
In the research organization, I have worked on the development of recommendation algorithms for an online golf booking service. Based on a previous study, I have conducted further assessments and proposed improvement ideas in terms of both theory and practice.
02/2012 – 02/2013
Part-time Software Engineer
HANASAKE PICTURES, Fukushima, Japan
Contributed to the development of (1) PHP applications for a Japanese avatar-based social networking service, and (2) 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
Led the development of a Ruby on Rails-based web application "Aizu Weather" for regional weather monitoring, accompanied by interactive geospatial data visualization using 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)