Rakuten Research:
Automation, better than human.

OUR MESSAGE

We would like to introduce the mission and research directions of RIT to convey our excitement.

Mission & Vision
Missions of RIT is fully aligned with Rakuten's mission to empower Rakuten membership.

Vision of RIT is "automation, better than human." Very impressive aspect of AI in the recent years is the demonstration of power of AI that can be better than human in tasks such as language and vision processing, as well as games such as Go and multi-player online games.

We would like to develop AI capability that can outperform human in the industry Rakuten leads, such as Fintech and Ecommerce shopping. For example, AI could potentially provide better asset management advice than human operators, or better product purchase advice than human shop assistant. With this vision in mind, we aim to achieve two big goals at the same time, namely industry success and academic breakthroughs.

Core AI
To achieve such ambitious goals, we develop 4 core AI programs, Customer, Language, Vision, and Voice program.

With unique proposition of Rakuten's mission to empower membership, we believe the source of innovation lies in the deep understanding of customer demands and behaviors.

We have seen very impressive progress of science in the last 100 years especially physics and chemistry. However, understanding of human being has been very challenging to even genius of Einstein, due to the lack of data related to human behaviors. Internet and smartphone era has brought unprecedented amount of such human data, and opened up the possibility of science for human understanding for the first time in history. We are very excited by this perspective.

Customer program aims to advance the understanding of human behavior with the concrete goals of understanding and predicting customers' behaviors. In particular, we would like to understand key decisions such as how people spend money and time. This customer understanding is supported by language, vision and voice programs.

For example, for understanding money spending, we can gain great understanding of customers if we could deeply understand what they buy. In return, products and services can be understood through category, descriptions and pictures. To this end, in the Language and Vision program, we are challenging to develop fully automated product catalog, by automating category classification, attribute extraction, and item-product linkage. Also, we apply language processing to classify queries to quantify customers’ demands for brands and pain-points.

Voice program provides very important venue to understanding customers, since a large portion of our communications are still done through speaking. We are challenging to develop voice interface for our customers, including voice assistant to provide customer support AI on smartphones in our mobile service.

Moonshot
In addition to our core AI programs, we also develop Moonshot projects.

First moonshot is autonomous network.
Rakuten’s mobile service is based on fully virtualized software-defined network developed for the first time in the world. This implies we have the potential to fully automate our network with self-healing and self-optimization properties. Developing such fully automated network will be a breakthrough in the industry, and we aim to achieve this.

Second moonshot is curing cancer supported by AI.
Rakuten is developing a new drug for curing cancer, called photo-immunotherapy. Our AI team in India is challenging to support such drug development by identifying the key biomarkers and bio-process of the drug.

Third moonshot is quantum technology.
We are developing a small theoretical physics group to develop quantum technology strategy, including quantum computer, quantum communications and quantum sensors. We are partnering with a major US university to collaborate to develop solutions.

Global advisory committee
We ensure to raise our research level to be at the top of the world, by getting the guidance and advice from renounced scientists and AI researchers, so called Rakuten Global Advisory Committee. Our researchers in RIT have the opportunity to learn and discuss their research topics with the top researchers.

We are always looking for great talents and researchers to lead us and work with us. Please contact us if you are interested in RIT.