NEWS

The National Institute of Informatics (NII), one of the administrators of Rakuten data release (RDR), hosted the IDR User Forum on November 30 in Tokyo. IDR, which stands for the Informatics Research Data Repository, provides research infrastructure for informatics research community and various data sets for researchers. The forum serves as an interactive hub for both data providers and users working at universities and research institutions, as well as industry and civic organizations.

Yuki Nakayama, research scientist at RIT Tokyo, introduced recent and ongoing research in RIT utilizing the same data we released through RDR. Rakuten Travel’s annual Breakfast Festival is one such example, where travel hotels compete for the title of No.1 breakfast in Japan. The festival begins with reviewing data analysis to decide champion hotels by prefecture, followed by cook-off tournaments with over 1,000 regional dishes. With Rakuten Recipe, Rakuten’s sanctuary for food lovers, we developed a scheme for detecting duplicate recipes and duplicate recipes users via instructions and food images.

Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT) presented the “Rakuten Award” to one specially-selected student who produced the most exceptional poster presentation at the forum. There were 41 students who put forth their distinctive poster presentations using Rakuten data release.

We would like to extend our gratitude to the many students who presented as well as all the forum attendees working diligently to advance the future of informatics.