Lecture List

• Hiroshi Mikitani(Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Rakuten, Inc.,)

  Time:

  13:00-13:20 (20min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track A (4th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Hiroshi Mikitani is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Rakuten, Inc., Born in Kobe, Japan, Mikitani earned his undergraduate degree in commerce from Hitotsubashi University in 1988. After graduation, he joined the Industrial Bank of Japan (IBJ), Limited, now Mizuho Corporate Bank, and became an investment banker. While working at IBJ, Mikitani attended Harvard Business School and earned his MBA in 1993. In 1995, Mikitani left IBJ and founded Crimson Group the following year, a consulting company, and became its President and CEO. In February of 1997, he founded MDM, Inc. (now Rakuten, Inc.) and became its President and CEO. With only a handful of staff, Mikitani successfully launched the “Rakuten Ichiba” in May of the same year. In June 1999, MDM, Inc. changed its name to Rakuten, Inc. Rakuten, Inc. completed its IPO and was listed on the JASDAQ market in April 2000. Rakuten, Inc. (JASDAQ: 4755), is one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, providing a variety of consumer and business-focused services including e-commerce, travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, portal & media, online marketing and professional sports. Rakuten is expanding globally and currently has operations throughout Asia, Western Europe, and the Americas. Founded in 1997, Rakuten is headquartered in Tokyo, with over 10,000 employees and partner staffs worldwide. twitter: @hmikitani

  

• On relentless automation in software development

  Kosuke Kawaguchi(Architect / CloudBees, Inc.)

  The benefits of automated build and test, also known as “Continuous Integration” (CI), are now well-understood among developers. Jenkins as a tool to implement this practice has also matured and it is now widely considered the most adopted CI tool in the market, especially here in Japan. If you have started understanding the value of automation in software development, this talk is for you --- we'll discuss why build and test automation is only the beginning, the underlying forces that are driving us in this direction, and where this voyage is heading to.

  Time:

  12:00-12:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track A (4th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the creator of Jenkins. He wrote the majority of Jenkins core single-handedly. He has over 10 years of extensive experience in software development, ranging from Java to C++, .NET to x64 assembly, as well as system expertise on platforms including Windows, Linux and Solaris. This broad range of expertise was a key enabler in various advanced features of Jenkins. Aside from Jenkins, Kohsuke was involved in JAXB, Metro web services stack, GlassFish v3, and RELAX NG at Sun Microsystems. He's also known for a large number of open-source projects. Today Kohsuke is an elite architect and developer at CloudBees, where he spends his days bringing Jenkins to the cloud and making the Jenkins core even better. [1] //www.slideshare.net/kohsuke/building-developer-community [2] //www.slideshare.net/kohsuke/developer-summit-continuous-deliveryjenkins

  

• Agile and Innovation: Hand-in-Hand at Atlassian

  Nicholas Muldoon(Agile Evangelist at Atlassian)

  What does success mean at Atlassian? It means building and delivering two products in just six months that in their first year each gained over 1,000 customers. It means continually improving the velocity with which the company releases new functionality to customers, and with which it responds to customers. The speaker will describe the steps that Atlassian has taken to become an agile company, and highlight both the successes and obstacles it has experienced along the way. You’ll also learn how Atlassian has continued to push the boundaries of innovation.

  Time:

  12:00-12:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track B (4th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Nicholas Muldoon, Agile Evangelist for Atlassian, works closely with customers helping to ensure that they experience maximum benefit from Agile development practices and processes. Previously, Nick served as Product Manager for the company’s GreenHopper product line - Agile project management software for Scrum and Kanban teams. Before joining Atlassian, he ran support operations for an Australian consulting company. Nick is a frequent speaker at industry conferences on topics related to Agile, DevOps, innovation and getting the most value from customer feedback loops. Website : http://www.atlassian.com/ Twitter : @nickmuldoon HP : http://nicholasmuldoon.com/

  

• Jubatus: Realtime deep analytics for BigData

  Daisuke Okanohara(Preferred Infrastructure Inc.)

  Currently, we face new challenges in realtime analytics of BigData, such as social monitoring, M2M sensor, online advertising optimization, smart energy management and security monitoring. To analyze these data, scalable machine learning technologies are essential. Jubatus is the open source platform for online distributed machine learning on the data streams of BigData. We explain the inside technologies of Jubatus and show how jubatus can achieve realtime analytics in various problems.

  Time:

  15:00-15:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track A (4th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Daisuke Okanohara is the co-founder and the vice president of Preferred Infrastructure Inc. His interests include statistical natural language processing, machine learning, data structures, and distributed data processing. He received his Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology from University of Tokyo in 2010. twitter : @hillbig HP : https://sites.google.com/site/daisukeokanohara/

  

• System Development, Culture and "Shikatanai"

  Masa Nakamura(VP/Senior Systems Architect at NRI America)

  In this session, we will analyze the cultural differences between Japan and the Unite States while we look back the history of software development processes in each country, then we will discuss what should be done to improve system development process in Japan.

  Time:

  16:00-16:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Cafeteria Floor - Track G (13th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] He has been working in computer industry for 30 years since he met FORTRAN on a mainframe computer when he was in high school. He joined Nomura Research Institute (NRI) in 1987. Since 1997, he have been working for NRI America as a systems developer. In 2005, he got US green card, now he is living in Silicon Valley. His interest is on Open Source, Agile Development and Cloud Computing.

  

• What does a next generation cloud platform look like?

  Derek Collison(Founder & CEO at Apcera, Inc.)

  The current state of the art in PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a first generation technology. There are some hard problems that need to be addressed and solved to move into a next generation system. All parts of the enterprise need to be addressed. In this talk we will discuss what Apcera feels is needed to meet the challenges of this next generation system.

  Time:

  16:00-16:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track A (4th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Derek Collison is the founder and CEO of Apcera, which is looking to deliver the next generation cloud platform. An industry veteran with over 20 yrs of experience, Derek designed and architected the industry's first Open PaaS, Cloud Foundry, while at VMware. Continuing his dream of a true next generation cloud platform, he founded Apcera.

  

• Design Thinking

  Jeff Patton

  Time:

  14:00-14:45 (45min)

  Place:

  Cafeteria Floor - Track G (13th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Jeff Patton has designed and built software for the past 15 years on a wide variety of products from on-line aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records. Jeff has focused on Agile approaches since working on an early Extreme Programming team in 2000. In particular Jeff has specialized in the application of user experience design practice to improve Agile requirements, planning, and ultimately the products delivered. Jeff currently works as an independent consultant, agile process coach, product design process coach, and instructor. Current articles, essays, and presentations on variety of topics in Agile product development can be found at www.AgileProductDesign.com and in Alistair Cockburn’s Crystal Clear. Jeff is founder and list moderator of the agile-usability Yahoo discussion group, a columnist with StickyMinds.com and IEEE Software, a Certified Scrum Trainer, and winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award for contributions to Agile Development.

  

• How to resolve Conflict

  Rumiko Seya(Japan Center for Conflict Prevention)

  Rumiko is a Secretary General of Japan Center for Conflict Prevention (JCCP) and has spent past 12 years as an expert on Conflict Resolution and DDR : Disarmament(武装解除), Demobilization(動員解除), and Reintegration(社会復帰) in war affected countries. As a change agent of such society and community, she has put her efforts, skills and passions to promote security, social development as well as reconciliation in counties in Africa and Asia. There are sometimes emotional conflicts between perpetrators and victims. She will share about roots of her passion and her stories of bridge the knowing-doing gaps through real case examples from JCCP activities in Somalia, South Sudan, Kenya as well as her previous experiences in Afghanistan and other areas affeceted by armed conflict. We recommend to read her book『職業は武装解除』before this session.

  Time:

  15:00-15:45 (45min)

  Place:

  Cafeteria Floor - Track G (13th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Ms. Rumiko SEYA Rumiko Seya is a Secretary General of the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention (JCCP) since April 2007. JCCP is an international NGO with field offices in three countries such as Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan, in addition to its headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. The organization runs a wide variety of field projects, ranging from community security and safety, DDR (Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration), to capacity building, livelihood, peacebuilding programmes and reconciliation. It has been active since 1999, and was registered as an official NGO under the name JCCP in 2002. Prior to JCCP she worked for; * Rwanda in 2001 as an NGO Project Coordinator * United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) in 2002-2003 as a Reintegration Officer * Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan in 2003-2005 as a Special Assistant to Ambassador on DDR and SSR; * United Nations Operation in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI) in 2006-2007 as DDR (Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration) Officer. She also served as an Election Observers in Indonesia in July 1999, Rwanda in March 2001 and Afghanistan in December 2004. She is a lecturer / facilitator for the International Peace Support Training Centre (IPSTC) in Kenya, Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center (KAIPTC) in Ghana, UN/AU peacekeeping missions and Japanese Ministry of Defense / Foreign Affairs / Finance. She occasionally works as a consultant for UNDP, DPKO and Japanese government since 2007 in Security Sector Reform, DDR, peacekeeping training. Ms. Seya obtained an MA in Conflict Resolution from Bradford University in UK and was also a Research Fellow on Peacebuilding at Hiroshima University in 2005-2006. She was awarded the Edward Lynn Award Fund (UK, 2000), Akino Yutaka Research Fellowship (Japan, 2000), UN21 Award (United Nations, 2003), Nikkei Women Award 2012 (Japan, 2011).

  

• Refinements - A new feature of Ruby

  Shugo Maeda

  Monkey patching is a powerful way to extend existing classes. However, it is too powerful and sometimes breaks existing code. This presentation introduces a new feature of Ruby called Refinements, which provide a way to extend existing classes locally.

  Time:

  15:00-15:45 (45min)

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track B (4th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Shugo Maeda is a Ruby committer and has been involved in development of Ruby since 1997. He works as a director at the Network Applied Communication Laboratotry, and also works as the secretary general at the Ruby Association. He loves his family and fishing.

  

• Infrastructure as code, or how to deploy a datacenter in 7 days

  Hanno Liem(V.P. Global Operations, Kobo Inc.)

  How do you go about automating a heterogeneous environment of Windows and Unix-like systems with a mix of SQL and No-SQL backends? The Kobo Operations team has leveraged and combined simple open source tools to automate everything from the development environment to stage to production, allowing for rapid development and testing to deployment. New deployments start with bare metal hardware and are managed by a Deployment Management Tool (DMT) that builds servers from scratch and automates every process that might have been done manually. In this talk, we share some secrets of this infrastructure, their advantages and the design decisions made.

  Time:

  14:00-14:45(45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track A (4th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Hanno has been designing, building and managing Internet infrastructures since 1992, applying hacker and managerial skills to run large Internet sites such as Kijiji and eBay. Before moving to Canada in 2010 he also lectured at the University of Amsterdam on large-scale infrastructure design. He holds a third degree black belt in Universal Fighting arts and teaches a weekly Krav Maga course at Kobo where he is the VP of Operations. He is allergic to kryptonite.

  

• Exploring User Wish Through Mindmapping

  Kenji Hiranabe

  Gathering requirements and writing user stories is always a challenging activity. Kenji Hiranabe has developed a method for exploring “User Wish” - the vague ideas users have before they shape user stories - through semi-structured interviews and mind maps! He uses mindmapping to interview users and picture their User Wishes, then converts them into user stories, use cases and UML.

  - What is a mind map?
  - How software development benefits from using mind maps
  - User Stories and mind maps - exploring user wishes through mind mapping
  - Demonstration and workshop

  Time:

  12:00-12:45 (45min)

  Place:

  Cafeteria Floor - Track G (13th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] An Agile software development practitioner and consultant in Japan. Kenji Hiranabe thinks of software development as a form of communication game, and is always searching for better ways to make it more productive, collaborative, and fun. He was the 2008 Gordon Pask Award Recipient for contributions to Agile practice. Also CEO of Change Vision, Inc.

  

Rakuten Sessions and Others

• Building Application Platform as a Service

  Yohei Sasaki

  We are building Application Platform as a Service by utilizing several OSS products such as CloudFoundry. There are a lot of benefits and challenges for developing and operating Platform as a Service in our enterprise web development. In this session, we'll describe how we have solved issues around building Application Platform as a Serviec and what we are going to bring for our developers.

  Time:

  15:00-15:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Rakuten University Floor - Track E (5th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Yohei Sasaki is a software engineer and joined Rakuten at 2010 to work on development of international e-commerce platform. Now he is a technical lead of Dev&Ops for Rakuten's Platform as a Service.

  

• API Workshop by Rakuten Web Service

  Shogo Kawahara

  Let's develop mashup contents with Rakuten Web Service API!! We are providing Rakuten (Japan) related APIs for 3rd party developers. In this workshop, you can learn how to make Web applications from Rakuten Web Service APIs and deploy them on PaaS. Please bring your own laptop and let's enjoy!

  Time:

  16:00-16:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Rakuten University Floor - Track E (5th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Shogo Kawahara is in charge of software engineer and joined Rakuten at 2011 as a new graduate. He is developping, operating and advertising Rakuten Web Service API. twitter: @ooharabucyou

  

• speed, Dramatic changes.

  Narichika Kajihara

  As you may know, we are challenging for a re-born to a Global company.For that, our development style should be applied to a global style.Atlassian products were selected for the achievement of our objective.Our development style has been dramatically changed with the construction of R-Atlassian. In this session, I will introduce some cases of our projects, how we start and deploy the Atlassian products.

  Time:

  14:00-14:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track B (4th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Narichika Kajihara is in charge of product manager of Atlassian tools and supporting developer tool. furthermore He has responsibility of improving and maintaining their environments of Rakuten developper. He joined Rakuten Inc at 2007 in Rakuten as system infra engineer. He is try to change the development style to Agile style for his project and he is challenging to become scrum master.

  

• Rakuten Tech Talk - Rakuten ruined my engineering life. -

  Tatsuya Sato

  This talks covers Rakuten Tech Talk, a series of workshops for Rakuten engineers. This workshops started in the last year. The purpose is to encourage Rakuten engineers to talk their technologies and their services by themselves. The speaker is the organizer of Tech Talk, Tatsuya Sato. He will talk why he started and the goal of his activity, his passion.

  Time:

  16:00-16:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Rakuten University Floor - Track C (5th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Tatsuya Sato is in charge of building Application Platform as a Service and supporting Ruby developers in Rakuten. Rubyist. He entered Rakuten as a new grads 2009. He loves Ruby　 too much so wants to diffuse the use of the programming language Ruby in Rakuten. On the other hand, he is organizing internal workshop, Rakuten Tech Talk. He is the father of two children. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/satoryu

  

• 10% Rule - Challenge to Making Innovative team -

  Taichi Watanabe

  Our department started "10% rule" in 2008. At this "rule", engineers set their own goal freely and use 10% of their business hours for developing their product. But recently, entrant of 10% rule had been decreasing for some reasons. So, we formed new organizer team, and are trying to make this rule more exciting. In this session, I'll introduce what did we try and what are we trying now.

  Time:

  15:00-15:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Rakuten University Floor - Track C (5th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Taichi Watanabe is a software engineer and joined Rakuten in 2008 as a new graduate. Since that, he has been developer of Rakuten Travel. Now, he also challenges a role of Scrum Master.

  

• Future of data science in Rakuten
  ～a case study of improving Rakuten services based on the understanding of users' behaviors～

  Takuya Kitagawa

  Understanding diverse customers' needs and behaviors underlies great services of a company. This is why many online companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google are making tremendous efforts in recent years to analyze so-called "Big Data." With its Japanese spirits of "Omotenasi," Behavior insight strategy (BIS) team in Rakuten takes unique, scientific approach to understanding and modeling customers' behaviors and improving Rakuten services. As an example, here we introduce our recent initiatives to gauge customers' intentions for visiting websites based on click streams, and cater website navigations for achieving their goals. Through modelings of customer browsing, it is possible to segment customers intentions and find "persona" of behaviors. Since the emphasis is on customer satisfactions rather than company's profits, we ask and solve unconventional questions that go beyond retargeting and recommendation algorithms. Please come and hear from us our exciting new initiatives for Big Data.

  Time:

  14:00-14:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Rakuten University Floor - Track E (5th Floor)

  [Speaker's Bio] Takuya Kitagawa is a director of data science initiative in Rakuten called behavior insight strategy (BIS) department. BIS is a new initiative in Rakuten which enhances and recreates online experience of customers through insights of Big Data. As a social mission, BIS also aims to provide novel approaches to and understanding of human emotions and behaviors, which should complement and advance fields such as psychology, economics, computer science and even sociology. We currently look for excited talents for this rare opportunity of transforming insights from data science to services with real social impacts, so please talk with me if you are interested. Takuya Kitagawa graduated from Nada high school and Harvard college in physics and mathematics. Currently he is a theoretical physicist with more than 17 publications in refereed journals including Physical Review Letters, Science and Nature Communications. twitter: @takuyakitagawa

  

• RIT All Stars 1

  Masaya Mori & Rakuten Institute of Technology Members

  We have a strategic research institute. That is named “RIT”, standing for Rakuten Institute of Technology. We recruit computer science researchers, mainly phD and are trying to utilize academic knowledge, So as to turn emerging and growing new technology seeds into new business and service opportunity For enriching the internet life all over the world. We have many research projects worldwide. It goes widely from datamining, through NLP, Semantic Web, Cloud, High Performance Computing, Next UI/UX to Ubiquitous Computing. In this session, Masaya Mori, the executive officer of Rakuten and the founding director of RIT worldwide, and Satoshi Sekine, the director of RIT-NY will make an overview of RIT. And, each researcher will make a presentation about his/her research, including LeoFS, AR-HITOKE, and other up-to-date technologies. Based on that we will make some suggestions how to keep abreast of current trends in terms of utilization of technologies.

  Time:

  14:00-14:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Rakuten University Floor - Track D (5th Floor)

  [Speakers' Bios] Masaya Mori is the founding director of Rakuten Institute of Technology since 2006, and is in charge of developing and managing R&D, Architects organization and making IT strategies in Rakuten Inc. Mr. Mori has created a technology vision for next reality anticipating trends of the world centering on the Internet in the near future, and has provided critical insights. He has been a member of Ruby Standardization Working Group of IPA, a member of steering committee of Ruby Association, a member of Next Generation IT People Planning Working Group and CIO Fostering Working Group of METI Japan. He co-authored a book of “The Complete Cloud Computing” and the author of “Big Changes on the Web”. Before joining Rakuten, Mr. Mori was an upper manager at Accenture, in charge of IT visioning and IT strategy planning and mainly consulted with major companies in product industry and public services in Japan. twitter: @emasha Satoshi Sekine is the director of RIT-NY. He received Ph.D. from New York University and then work as an assistant/associate professor at NYU. His main research field is Natural Language Processing, in particular Information Extraction, Named Entity and Knowledge Extraction. He joined Rakuten in 2010 and has been working as vice director of RIT-Tokyo, as well.

  

• RIT All Stars 2

  This is the second session from RIT all stars. RIT has 3 research domains, that we call "Power Domain", "Reality Domain" and "Intelligence Domain." In this session, 3 lead researchers will make a presentation from each domain in sucession.
  Hara will explain about the power of LeoFS on behalf of Power Domain. LeoFS is RIT's original distrubted file system which released as OSS cloud storage on July 4th. That's amazingly an evoliving dependable product with no SPOF based on Erlang.
  Masuko will introduce Reality Domain and show the futuristic experience through presentation of practical UI, UX, computer vision, augmented reality and so on. And, he will also make a suggestion for new reality which is going to integrate the real and the net. Let's enjoy an emerging world not existing before.
  Hirate will present Intelligence Domain and explain about the wider world where you can utilize data mining, NLP, search technique and related technogies for many practical areas of e-commerce. What kind of technical issues does e-commerce have? What kind of area can you use data mining and related technologies for? How big result do you get by applying academic knowledge? He will answer to those questions by giving examples.
  
  15:00 - 15:20 Hara for LeoFS
  15:20 - 15:30 Masuko for Reality Domain
  15:30 - 15:40 Hirate for Intelligence Domain
  15:40 - 15:45 Q&A
  
  

  Time:

  15:00-15:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Rakuten University Floor - Track D (5th Floor)

  [Speakers' Bios] Yosuke Hara is a chief technologist of Rakuten Institute of Technology. His interests include distributed file system, cloud computing and high performance computing. He released "LeoFS" as OSS cloud storage system on July 2012. Soh Masuko is a Team Manager of Reality Domain Team in RIT-TOKYO. His main research field is Entertainment Computing, and is focusing on research regarding New Shopping User Interface as a Lead Scientist. He received PhD. at University of Tsukuba and worked as a main developer of IPA Frontier Software Project in 2002, a Research Fellow of Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 2006, and has been a steering committee member of IPSJ-GCAD. He joined Rakuten in 2008 and has been working as a lecturer(Non-Full-time) at University of Tsukuba as well. Yu Hirate received his M.E. degree and Ph.D. in Engineering from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan in 2005 and 2008, respectively. From 2006 to 2009, He was a research associate of Media Network Center, Waseda University. In 2009, he joined Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT), Rakuten, Inc. Currently, he is a chief scientist of RIT, managing intelligence domain team. His area of research is Data Mining.

  

• RIT All Stars 3

  This is the third session from RIT all stars. In this session, a variety of 6 researchers makes presentations about their research topics in a row. It covers a wide field from Data Mining, NLP, Semantic Web, Economic Analysis, GPU Computing, to Ubiquitous Computing. Let's enjoy various kinds of R&D!
  
  16:00 - 16:06 Shinzato for Product Information Extraction from Item Description
  16:06 - 16:12 Chung for Mining Food Entity Relationship in Recipe Service
  16:12 - 16:18 Phamthanhthao for Brand Names Extraction
  16:18 - 16:24 Umeda for Purchase Prediction by Statistical Analysis
  16:24 - 16:30 Ali for GPU - based Image Search
  16:30 - 16:36 Sanjo for Empowering Research Scientists
  16:36 - 16:45 Q&A
  
  

  Time:

  16:00-16:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Rakuten University Floor - Track D (5th Floor)

  [Speakers' Bios] Keiji Shinzato is a senior scientist of Rakuten Institute of Technology. His research interests are natural language processing, and information retrieval. He received Ph.D. in Information Science from Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 2006. Young-joo Chung joined Rakuten Institute of Technology as an associate after receiving Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology from University of Tokyo in 2011. Her interests include data mining, machine learning, and anomaly detection. NGUYEN Pham Thanh Thao is an assistant research scientist at Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT), Rakuten Inc. She has been working on dictionary extraction especially for product catalog DB, after she joined RIT as a member of Intelligence team in Sep 2010. Her interests include semantic data, graph mining and data visualization. Takashi Umeda is an associate of Rakuten Institute of Technology, Rakuten Inc. His interests include consumer behavior modeling and marketing science. Previously, he developed some forecasting models of consumer purchasing. Before joining Rakuten, he was engaged in research of recommendation and got the best paper award of first Rakuten R&D symposium. Ali Cevahir received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, and Ph.D. in Mathematical and Computing Sciences from Tokyo Institute of Technology. He joined Rakuten Institute of Technology in 2010. His research interests include parallel scientific computing, GPU computing and high performance information retrieval. Masahiro Sanjo is a senior coordinator of Rakuten Institute of Technology. He works for Rakuten Data Release and conducts a collaborative research.

  

• Rakuten's Global Experience Program - Rakuten Samurais go abroad -

  Hajime Masuda, Hiroko Nozawa, Daisuke Kusaka and Hideaki Konishi

  Global Experience Program (GEP) is one of the educational programs in Rakuten for growing human resources who can work globally. Successful candidates are sent to our overseas offices for several months and learn processes, technologies and cultures there. In this session, trainees will talk about their experiences. What they learned, what is the difference between working in Japan and foreign countries, and how they are spreading the experiences after getting back to Japan. This session must be exciting, especially for who is interested in working abroad. Don't miss it !!

  Time:

  14:00-14:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Rakuten University Floor - Track C (5th Floor)

  [Speakers' Bios] Hajime Masuda, Hiroko Nozawa, and Hideaki Konishi were San Francisco GEP trainees. They learned agile development process through real projects. Hajime worked on a smart phone app development project as an engineer, Hiroko worked on smart phone project and global shopping project as a producer, and Hideaki worked on an iPhone application development project as a scrum master / designer. Daisuke Kusaka was a Buy.com GEP trainee. He worked on its business model transition project (from 1st party to marketplace model) and various development process improvements projects.

  

• Englishnization and Engineering - How Rakuten Supports Engineers -

  Kyle Yee, Kazumi Koizumi, Eiji Shinohara

  The EnglishnizationProject (EP) is one of most important projects in Rakuten’s history. Kyle who leads the project will discuss what the EnglishnizationProject is and how Rakuten has managed the project thus far. Koizumi who leads the internal promotion activities as the Rakuten News chief editor will share how some of the staff have handled their learning and achieved their goals. Shinohara who is an engineer on theKobo team will talk about his own experiencesof learning English and balancing it with his engineering life.

  Time:

  16:00-16:45 (45min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track B (4th Floor)

  [Speakers' Bios] Kyle Yee joined Rakuten, Inc. in 2001. He is in charge of the Englishnization (E13N) Project. Prior to this project, he worked in the CEO Office, Global Business Department, Corporate Planning, and Rakuten Ichiba. Prior to Rakuten, he worked as an English language teacher, textbook writer, curriculum designer, and teacher trainer for ten years. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology, master’s degree in teaching English as a foreign/second language, and a master’s degree in financial economics. Kazumi Koizumi worked in her previous company as a sales representative. She joined Rakuten in 2000 and worked in the Public Relations Department for five years. She was transferred to the Internal Communications Group in 2005. She edits our internal company magazines. She is also the managing editor of our internal news and corporate SNS. Eiji Shinohara is a software engineer. He joined Rakuten in 2007. He was in charge of DevOps for Rakuten ID, Rakuten Super Point, Advertising service and so on. In 2011, he worked at San Francisco office as an Android app developer. And in 2012, worked at Kobo in Trotonto as a QA engineer. Blog: http://shinodogg.com twitter: @shinodogg

  

• Lightning Talks

  Lightning Talk is one of the featured sessions in Rakuten Technology Conference. All presenter from both of inside and outside Rakuten make a 4-minutes LT in English! Please enjoy literally lightning talks!

  Time:

  17:00-18:00

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track A (4th Floor)

  Paul McMahon / Tokyo's International Developer Community Yuya Kakui / "English × Scrum → My Globalization" Xuping Huang / Data's authentication using information hiding hageyahhoo(The Hiro) / How do you like ADAPT? Tarun / DIVE INTO HTML5 Marat / Hacking in agile way Akihiro Matsuura / What I talk about When I talk about cocos2d-x COM All Stars / "LOVE BEGINS - peer reading on kobo" Goro Otsubo / PadHome:Explorer real estate information on iPad Darren Cook / Discovering Hidden Messages! Hiroki Matsue / LeoFS and ROMA simple hack TakuChan / A Basic Study for A Face-to-face Communication Medium That Conveys Cozy Actions at An Early Stage of A Romance Gaurav Pawar (Gp) / Rich JavaScript Applications

  

• Rakuten Technology Award 2012

  Rakuten Technology Award, which recognizes outstanding achievements for contributors to internet technology evolution, has been held annually with cordial message of Rakuten in Rakuten Technology Conference since 2008. This year, who will win the award? We will hold the show and reveal the winners in this conference. Please expect it!

  Time:

  18:00-18:30 (30min)

  Movie

  Place:

  Main Floor - Track A (4th Floor)