Rakuten Technology Conference 2023

Speakers

Speaker's Profile:

Prathyusha Jwalapuram did her PhD at the Nanyang Technological University, with research work focusing on evaluation of machine generated text, extending beyond the sentence level and across multiple languages. She also has a background in both computational linguistics and computer science. In this talk, Prathyusha will discuss the collection and creation of datasets for the purpose of evaluating large language models. She will explore the limitations that one needs to be aware of while using existing datasets and metrics for evaluating models, and what pitfalls to watch out for while collecting or building your own. She will also briefly touch upon how to establish guidelines for human annotation and evaluation.

Speaker's Profile:

Horiuchi Haruku has started his career as business analyst for corporate strategy and mergers & acquisitions at Yahoo Japan Corporation before leading early stage global startup investment across Japan, SEA and EMEA at Corporate Venture Capital arm. After joining Rakuten in 2017, he drove AI & Data strategy as strategy manager and worked on Rakuten businesses as AI products incubation manager to offer last one mile delivery optimization, marketing optimization and credit scoring. Since 2021, he was relocated to Singapore to manage software IPs and its strategy, and has been leading Rakuten’s core ecosystem such as marketing, loyalty and incentive platforms. In his session, Haruku will be sharing on facing the reality that technologies we use today are old and not that flexible enough to quickly accommodate changes. He will explore the methods to champion the innovation through AI in the field of large and legacy production environment.

Speaker's Profile:

Passionate about open source movements and virtual beings, Soh Wan Wei is also the CEO of W3bverse.org and IKIGUIDE Metaverse Collective (IMC). Wan Wei has given keynotes at more than 100 reputable Web3.0, metaverse and A.I. industry conferences and hackathons globally. She has also consulted with multiple thriving and successful metaverse projects. We will explore some of the specific ways in which AI is powering the next evolution of the creator economy. We will also discuss the challenges and opportunities that AI presents for creators, and how they can best position themselves to succeed in the AI-powered future.

Speaker's Profile:

Ankita Satija comes with more than a decade of experience in product management across e-commerce, marketplace, and B2C domains. At ViSenze, she oversees the Discovery Suite platform with a focus on Search and Recommendations. Previously, she was the Product Manager at Indeed, where she was responsible for leading the launch of a new employer messaging app and for user onboarding and growth. Ankita’s expertise lies in user-centric and data-driven product management and delivering delightful experiences to help users succeed. Her extensive exposure to global products, spanning Australia, Southeast Asia, India, and the United States, positions her to bring a wealth of international experience to ViSenze.

Speaker's Profile:

Kim Falk has more than 20+ years of experience in the tech domain including 12+ years in Data Science, specializing in recommender systems and personalization. He is currently the Principal Data Scientist Engineer at ViSenze, where he is responsible for steering the recommendation strategy. Most recently, he was the Staff Recommender Engineer at Shopify, where he served as the technical lead of the product recommendation team within the discovery group. Kim has worked on recommender systems for IKEA and British Telecom, among others. He has also created the Danish NLP models for named entity extraction and Deep Learning classifiers to predict verdicts of legal cases. Kim excels in recommender systems and personalization, optimizing discovery platforms and mentoring engineers. He's the author of "Practical Recommender Systems" and served as the industry co-chair at the ACM RecSys conference in 2019 and 2020.

Speaker's Profile:

CATALYSTxAI is a weekend-long hackathon organised by NUS in which 150 participants from anywhere are able to develop their hackathon idea revolving around 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The top 3 teams will be sharing their experiences and insights as well as their innovative AI solutions. Find out how the teams, composed of talented individuals from different tertiary institutions, harnessed the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address the various United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Speaker's Profile:

Nitesh is a seasoned senior product manager with expertise in the dynamic fields of Logistics, Ad Tech, and Ecommerce. With a career journey that commenced from Business Development and later transitioned into the role of Business Analyst within a Service and Product startup, Nitesh has diligently evolved into a Tech Project Manager and, ultimately, a Tech Product Manager. Distinguished by a profound passion for enhancing user experiences, he thrives on collaborating with technology teams and formulating strategies with key business stakeholders to develop products that deliver delightful experiences and leaves a lasting positive impact on society. In 2019, Nitesh joined Rakuten. Since then, he has handled two Ad Tech products and successfully crafted a creative review management platform. Currently, he is leading a cutting-edge Targeting Display Ad product, contributing to Rakuten's ongoing innovation and impact in the technology and advertising space.