Takuya Kitazawa

10/2020 – Present

Senior Product Manager

02/2021 – Present

Treasure Data (Canada), Vancouver, BC, Canada

10/2020 – 02/2021

Treasure Data, Tokyo, Japan

• Serving a product management role in the digital marketing, data analytics, and machine learning domain. Product features I was in charge of include: out-of-the-box data visualization, A/B testing, and predictive modeling.
• Productizing solution templates in an in-house Treasure Boxes ecosystem to accelerate advanced, strategic use of rich customer data. I have also worked closely with the business development team to collaborate with the partners and develop the platform together.

02/2020 – 09/2020

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 unit, 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.

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)