Rakuten Technology Conference 2024
The Rakuten Technology Conference is Rakuten’s annual tech event which brings tech leaders, engineers, researchers and tech enthusiasts from around the world together at Rakuten Crimson House, Rakuten Group’s headquarters in Tokyo, to explore the future horizons of technology.
This year, in the 16th edition of the event, under the theme of “AI-nization 4.all,”the talks and panel discussions will focus on the transformative potential of AI and its impact on the technology landscape.
The Rakuten Technology Conference 2024 is open to anyone and free to join. We look forward to seeing you there.
Activities include:
Talks and panels with tech leaders and experts from a wide range of fields, including AI and cloud
Interact with the speakers and other guests in the networking areas and at the after-event party
Fun activities for both children and adults at the Kids Park
Lunch and refreshments at the company cafeteria
After graduating from Kansai University, Kurozumi started his business career at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) in 1997 where he spent 4 years. He joined Rakuten, Inc. (now Rakuten Group, Inc.) in 2002, primarily working in the Development Division. He was appointed as Executive Officer in 2008, and in 2013 moved to the USA to take on the role of Vice President of the Americas Development Unit at Rakuten USA, Inc. After returning to Japan, Kurozumi was appointed Senior Executive Officer in 2019 and Group Senior Managing Executive Officer in 2022 (current position). Kurozumi has been leading the technology organization in the Commerce & Marketing Company for many years. In May 2023, he was appointed as CIO, and in September of the same year, he was appointed as CTO of Rakuten Group where he is responsible for the technology that supports the Rakuten Ecosystem.
Ting Cai is the Chief AI & Data Officer at Rakuten, where he leads AI and Data strategy, engineering and services for the company’s ecosystem of 70+ businesses. He is also responsible for the Rakuten Institute of Technology, Rakuten’s global research organization. Before joining Rakuten, Ting served as a Senior Director at Google, overseeing the Local Search product strategy and development. Prior to that, he held various senior leadership roles at Microsoft in Bing and Commerce, including serving as General Manager for News & Feeds. He holds a master's degree in computer science from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the University of Washington.
Born in Gunma Prefecture.
Master of Business Administration and Master of
Educational Technology.
Over 20 years in the IT industry in Silicon Valley
and Tokyo.
Joined Microsoft Japan in 2010. Responsible for
opening the Azure Japan region and launching the IoT
co-creation lab.
Since 2018, he has been in charge of business
applications such as Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
In charge of the Data & AI business since 2022.
From 2024, he will be a director of the Generative
AI Japan Association. Engaged in the dissemination of
responsible AI.
After completing a master's degree at Kyoto University Graduate School of Engineering, he
worked for a major Japanese System Integrator and joined Oracle Corporation Japan in 2000.
He worked in consulting, new business development, and sales section, and from 2016 he had
led the development team of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Paas/Iaas) business in Japan.
He has been supporting the Cloud transformation of many Japanese company and became the
head of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business in 2021.
Toshi oversees the domestic business development and sales activities related to AWS services and technologies from January 2024. He is responsible for introducing latest AWS technologies to customers while improving the AWS technologies based on customer feedbacks. Toshi joined AWS in 2012 to lead the business development for the Japanese market. Prior to the current role, Toshi led business development for AWS Compute services across Asia Pacific and Japan. Before joining AWS, Toshi was involved in system development and business development at a Japanese system integrator, as well as in management planning and business development of startup companies.
Japanese Digital industry leader in Ad Tech, Social and E Commerce. Joined AOL Japan in 2000 as Business Development and then worked at Overture Japan and Yahoo Japan. Managed multiple marketing channels at Amazon Japan, joined Criteo Japan in 2011 as a start-up & worked as Japan Managing Director and brought up Criteo to be one of the most successful ad-tech platforms across APAC markets. Now at Meta in Tokyo office since 2017 as Director of Commerce vertical.
Marc has over 20 years of experience in the ICT technology research and consulting focusing largely on the Telecommunications and Enterprise IT sectors. Prior to joining Counterpoint Research Marc held several senior positions in industry analyst firms in the USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. Based in Tokyo since 2010, Marc is a regular speaker at industry events and a frequent TV panelist. Marc also spent time in the strategy department of the largest mobile gaming company in Japan. A speaker of 6 languages, Marc holds a BSBA in Finance from Washington University in St. Louis and was a visiting student at Rangsit University in Bangkok, Thailand.
Rohit Dewan is an accomplished technology leader with over 25 years of experience in building innovative products and high-performance teams across diverse domains such as eCommerce, social gaming, consumer video, network security, and VoIP. He has successfully led major transformation initiatives, including the modernization of Rakuten’s global data and product catalog platforms. Rohit joined Rakuten in 2013 through the acquisition of Viki. He currently serves as the Division CTO of Technology Platforms Division and is an Executive Officer of Rakuten Group.
Okoshi joined Rakuten, Inc. (now Rakuten Group, Inc.) in 2012. In his current role, he oversees the global development organization centered in Japan, with offices in India, the United States, and Europe, leading data and AI utilization at Rakuten.
A technical leader oversees the architecture of Commerce Technology, mainly in charge of Rakuten Ichiba, one of Japan's largest e-commerce platforms. He is responsible for leading innovation and introducing new technologies into the platform. Currently, he is spearheading the technical integration of AI into Rakuten Ichiba. Makoto is excited to share his insights and experiences about the work that the Rakuten team is undertaking.
Hironori Yoshida started his career as a Linux system administrator, after graduating from Kyoto University with a major in chemistry. He engaged in enhancements of supercomputer systems, on-premise servers and network systems at the National Institute for Environmental Studies. He joined Rakuten, Inc. (now Rakuten Group, Inc.) in April 2008 and managed the Application Engineer Development team in the System Development Department for Rakuten GORA and Rakuten International EC services. From April 2016, Yoshida managed Rakuten Ichiba’s Infrastructure Team as a Senior Manager. In September 2021, he was appointed General Manager for Cloud Infrastructure, and has led the Cloud Platform Supervisory Department as a Vice Director since July 2024.
Lee is a seasoned ML scientist leading Rakuten's search, recommendation, and AI research in image and LLM technologies such as the Rakuten-AI-7B. Previously a Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft, Lee pioneered dense retrieval with the ICLR paper ANCE, now widely used in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.
Partha Seetala is the
President of the Cloud Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony
and formerly
Founder and CEO at Robin.io. With more than 25 years of
technology, product vision and
company building expertise, he has taken multiple
fully-featured products from concept to
market. He has conceived, designed and built products in
Scale-out distributed storage, File
Systems, Networking, Distributed Systems, Big Data, and
Information Analytics and
Containers/Kubernetes space.
Before joining Rakuten Symphony, Partha was the founder
and CEO of Robin.io, an industry
leader in the cloud-native platform space. Earlier in
his career, he held leadership positions at
Symantec's information and storage management business,
known as Veritas. In that capacity,
he conceived, architected and led teams to take multiple
products from concept to market. He
was also an adviser on multi-million-dollar product
lines including NetBackup, Cluster File
System, Veritas Cluster Server, and Information Fabric.
He holds a Master’s Degree in Computer
Science and Engineering from the University of
Minnesota.
Shuhei Yamamoto has 15 years of major public cloud experience at Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud. He led the hybrid cloud solution specialist team at Microsoft Japan until 2013 and was the Worldwide Cloud Infrastructure solution GTM lead at Microsoft Corporation until 2016. He earned an MBA degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2016. After working at AWS Japan and Google Cloud Japan, Yamamoto joined Rakuten Group in January 2023 and is now General Manager of the Cloud Platform Enablement Department in Technology Platforms Division. Additionally, he has led the Data Platform Department as General Manager since January 2024.
Maksim Tkachenko is a computer scientist at the Rakuten Institute of Technology, Singapore. He previously served as a data science and operations research advisor at FedEx Express and as a research scientist at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, where he earned his PH.D His research focuses on computational linguistics, machine translation, and foundation models.
Johanes Effendi is a research scientist at the Rakuten Institute of Technology, focusing on natural language processing (NLP), including large language models (LLM) and machine translation. He has a background in computer science from Universitas Indonesia and holds both a master's and a PhD from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan. His research spans speech processing, multilingual machine translation, and the development of LLMs.
He manages the entire development of Rakuten Ichiba at Rakuten Group, Inc. He joined Rakuten in 2012 as a mid-career and started as a Product Manager, working on key products such as Search, Shopping Cart, and Ichiba app. Later, as a manager, he established the product management organization and successfully led the replacement of the RMS Platform. Currently, his mission is to build a development organization that supports the evolution of Rakuten Ichiba.
Zoey is product manager leading both text search and visual search for Rakuten Ichiba. Before joining Rakuten, she has been incubating speech recognition and various Natural Language Processing AI products from a Singapore S$42.4 million industrial research joint enterprise AI lab (SCALE@NTU). Currently, Zoey constantly discovers various search user pain points and working closely with technical team to improve user experience and bring in more business benefit.
Josh is a manager leading the integration of Recommendation and Personalization within Rakuten Group services. Before joining Rakuten, he worked in Fashion-related E-Commerce as a data analyst where he conducted deep analysis on online users behaviors and supported marketing initiatives. After joining Rakuten as a mid-career in 2016, he joined Recommendation and Personalization as a producer. Currently, his mission is to keep gathering user needs and provide technical and AI solutions to leverage the power of recommendation in Rakuten.
With a distinguished career that includes roles such as Head of Digital Business and Chief Technology Innovation Officer (CTIO) at Avanade - a leading global system integrator, Managing Director of Technology and System Integration at Accenture - a international consulting firm, and Director of Solution Architect of Digital, Game and ISV/SaaS at AWS - a major cloud provider, I joined Rakuten in 2024. In my current capacity, I am dedicated to enhancing the quality of advertising systems and spearheading the development of next-generation advertising products.
Joined Rakuten in 2013, after working for a US-based computer company and a Japanese ERP software company. At Rakuten, led the launch and growth of a private DMP and a marketing platform for brand advertisers as a product manager, project manager and organizational manager. Currently leading a product management organization as an organizational manager, with responsibility for the overall development of ad products of Rakuten Ichiba.
Graduated from Clark University in Massachusetts, USA. Joined Rakuten Securities in 2016. Oversee data science team fostering collaboration and innovation. In August 2023, appointed as the Vice Department Manager of the newly established AI Data & Human Lab, currently leading R&D for AI products.
After a career in computational biology research in AIST Tokyo, Jean-Francois joined Rakuten in 2013 as a senior data scientist. Currently managing the company's biggest ML platform, he is passionate about democratizing state-of-the-art ML across Rakuten and empowering every team to accelerate innovation and improve customer experience.
Experienced in Application Engineering, Data Engineering, ML Engineering and Infrastructure Management. Joined Rakuten in 2017 as Senior Architect, now managing Data Platform & AI Platform to support Rakuten Data & AI strategy.
Stephen Li is a lead product manager at Rakuten AI Lab, managing AI-driven product initiatives like Universal Concierge and Universal Search. Before joining Rakuten, he led the development of ViSenze's Visual AI SaaS platform, which serves millions of customers and hundreds of retailers globally. Before moving into product management, Stephen was also a tech lead at Sopra Steria, where he helped build McDonald's McDelivery website for over 20 countries. Stephen is passionate about identifying user pain points and using innovative solutions to enhance user experience and drive business outcomes.
Driven by a passion for data's transformative power, Mimi’s career has been evolved around creating value with data. Since joining Rakuten in 2019, she has leveraged her expertise in Data Analytics across various roles in AI product development. Currently, she leads an international, cross-disciplinary team to create cutting-edge AI product to increase Marketing efficiency.
Began his career as a business
analyst in digital marketing, before moving into product
management ~10 years ago.
He has since created products across a wide range of
businesses including: IoT / Wearables, Augmented Reality
for Movies & National Elections and now Marketing Cloud.
Currently, he manages the Product Management Group
for Rakuten Marketing Cloud, with a focus on weaving AI
into its products to empower marketers in this new age
of AI!
Eric Olsen is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Rakuten Mobile. Prior to working at Rakuten he was leading Cyber Defense Operations teams across Asia at some of the largest banks (JP Morgan, UBS, Standard Chartered). He has over 18 years of experience working in cybersecurity across multiple verticals including Telcom, Banking, Defense, and Consulting.
Yeongnam Chae is an assistant manager at Rakuten Institute of Technology, where he leads a team dedicated to validating image and visual applications. Under the supervision of Prof. Hyun S. Yang, he received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from KAIST, Republic of Korea, in 2013. With 18 years of experience in the field, he has expertise in face recognition and generation, scene text recognition, and image validation.
Has worked on many transformative technologies before they became mainstream — real-time 3D, web 2.0, mobile apps, GPS navigation, location services and augmented reality, with 25 years spent designing experiences and architecture for user-centric software. Based in Yokohama, Japan for the past 15 years.
Risa is a product manager leading the product management team for Rakuten Ichiba. She oversees the front-end of Rakuten Ichiba and RMS - Merchant Platform for EC Store Management. Risa is dedicated to driving the evolution of Rakuten Ichiba, enhancing user experiences, and introducing new features for Rakuten Ichiba customers and merchants. Currently, she is taking on the challenge of integrating AI into the RMS. Before joining Rakuten, she led the development of e-commerce platforms and applications for an apparel brand as a product manager, and was also involved in embedded software, mobile applications, and hardware.
Get the RTC Event Timetable and Floor Map PDF now for easy access. Go Eco-Friendly.
Join us at the award ceremony for
Rakuten Technology Excellence Award winners.
Join us at the award ceremony for
Rakuten Technology Excellence Award winners.
Calling tech enthusiasts of all ages! Come and join us at Kids Park where you can enjoy the latest technologies, foster logical thinking, and feel the future!
Power Generation Experience
Learn about the importance of electricity while having fun pedaling the bicycle to move a mini steam locomotive!
Drones
Try your hand at piloting an AI-equipped compact drone or put on some goggles and experience an exciting flight by a professional drone pilot.
Rakuten Robot Club
Learn about robotics and AI at this fun and educational showcase from the Rakuten Robot Club.
Play Area
Take a break from the busy conference and enjoy the play area with your kids. (Photo is for illustration purposes only).
Drawing Space
Unleash your creativity at our drawing space!
Kids and families can enjoy fun coloring and drawing activities together.
Photos with Okaimono Panda
Capture magical moments with Okaimono Panda! Our fun photo area is filled with our event themed backdrops perfect for family photos.
Calling tech enthusiasts of all ages! Come and join us at Kids Park where you can enjoy the latest technologies, foster logical thinking, and feel the future!
DIRECTIONS
Rakuten Crimson House : 4 Minute Walk From Futako Tamagawa Station
SATELLITE LOCATIONS
SATELLITE LOCATIONS
Rakuten Technology Conference @Fukuoka is back again this year! Get ready for an array of captivating sessions featuring distinguished speakers from our own ranks as well as industry leaders from external companies. Stay tuned for the upcoming timetable update—this is an event you won't want to miss!
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Please join us in Osaka for the Rakuten Technology Conference this year! There will be interesting sessions broadcasted from Tokyo, and don't miss exciting live sessions only in Osaka as well. We invite you to come join this great opportunity to network and discuss AI-nization. We hope you can stay for our after-party and extend the discussion while enjoying drinks and snacks! Sign up today!
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We are so happy for this announcement again this year! In Sendai Satellite, we will have independent content again for engineers. Please feel free to join, even just for lunch and the beer bash!
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As part of the Rakuten Technology Conference 2024, Rakuten International will be presenting a panel discussion on the promise, risks, and likely future of AI. The panel discussion will be followed by dinner, after which we will virtually attend the official kick-off of the RTC 2024 in Tokyo.
The annual Rakuten Technology Conference is back with the theme “AI-nization 4.all”. Dalian, a pretty city in China, will participate as the satellite, there you can see the Main Stage Live Streaming and the wonderful topics from local experts. Looking forward to your arrival!
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The annual Rakuten Technology Conference is back with the theme “AI-nization 4.all”. Shanghai, a pretty city in China, will participate as the satellite, there you can see the Main Stage Live Streaming and the wonderful topics from local experts. Looking forward to your arrival!
REGISTER NOW
We, at Rakuten India, couldn’t be more excited to welcome you to the Rakuten Technology Conference 2024 in Bengaluru, India! This year’s theme, AI-nization 4.all, is about making AI work for everyone, everywhere. It’s going to be a day filled with inspiring talks, hands-on demo sessions, and meaningful conversations. We’re proud to have some incredible speakers joining us from India, and we can’t wait to share this experience with you!
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The Rakuten Technology Conference is held as an in-person event this year too! We have lined up a series of speakers who will be focusing on the transformative potential of AI and its impact on the technology landscape. Do feel free to join us, network and we look forward to seeing you there!
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ANNOUNCEMENT OF WINNERS