Strategic initiatives by Rakuten for developing technologies for the future

There is a dedicated group of research scientists driving strategic AI initiatives in Rakuten Institute of Technology who envisage and give form to some of the strategic bets of Rakuten. These initiatives are being undertaken to ensure Rakuten is always ahead of the technology curve.

There are three main initiatives under this program, one is healthcare initiative wherein Rakuten researchers work on the cure cancer using AI project, the second one is Rakuten mobile autonomous network wherein Rakuten researchers are working to build a fully autonomous software defined network, and lastly quantum computing in which research scientists are looking to establish the fundamentals and exploring real world use cases for quantum computing. The cure cancer initiative is being done in collaboration with Rakuten Medical Inc. which specializes in finding innovative ways in curing cancer using technology, namely photoimmunotherapy.

The goal of this initiative is to analyze medical imaging data, genomics data, proteomics data, and combine them all to predict the efficacy of treatment for a patient before treatment administered.

With this AI-enabled prediction, chances of success during the human trails of the treatment will increase, thereby making a strong case for approval of treatment technique by several medical regulatory bodies. The autonomous network initiative aims to help Rakuten mobile in building a fully autonomous network that will be self-organizing and self-healing.

With this kind of autonomy, call drops will be obviated due to optimized handover mechanisms and signals will not drop due to optimized load balancing. In case of any faults in the network, it will also have the power to heal itself, thereby reducing manual cost of repair and monitoring as well.