Rakuten Institute of Technology - R.I.T.
Rakuten Institute of Technology (R.I.T.) is the dedicated R&D organization within Rakuten, Inc. R.I.T. encourages "curiosity", "interest" & "challenge" of R&D members and promotes research & development in order to create opportunities combining emerging technologies with innovative services.
Concept
Rakuten has spent a decade evolving its business model centered on e-commerce, to create a market completely new to Japan, named "Rakuten Ichiba.". Now we provide many services such as travel agency ("Rakuten Travel"), securities ("Rakuten Sho-ken") and so on to bridge between real world and net usability. We think our many services are synergized one after another and new reality of our world will be born.
We call this "Third Reality". We predict the future of the internet, and promote R&D about new emerging technology and service.
Vision
R.I.T. has developed the future vision "Third Reality" by exchanging ideas and opinions with many external internet professionals and our unique R&D, and presents our basic view on following questions.
This vision shows the direction of coming technology and service, and offers materials for discussion what technology seeds we should invest. And our actual R&D projects are planned and executed along with this vision.
Mission
Our mission is to turn emerging and growing new technology seeds into new business/service opportunities to enrich the internet life (cyber life) all over the world.
Organization
We have Akinori Yonezawa who is a professor of computer science at Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo and one of the pioneers of object-based/oriented concurrent computing and Hidehiko Masuhara who is an associate professor at Department of Graphics and Computer Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo and whose research is programming languages, especially on aspect-oriented programming as the advisor, and we have Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) who is the chief designer of the Ruby programming language as the fellow. The board are structured by advisor Akinori Yonezawa, advisor Hidehiko Masuhara, fellow Matz and director Masaya Mori.
Research Topics
Natural Language Processing
Multimedia Processing
Data Mining
Massive and Distributed Computing
Activity
We create a vision anticipating trends of the world centering on the Internet in the near future, provides critical insights and develops exciting, new business services by focusing on technologies R&D members have strong interest in.