RAKUTEN PRODUCT CONFERENCE

Yasufumi Hirai

CIO & CISO Group Executive VP, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Takuya Kitagawa

Chief Data Officer, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Sunil Gopinath

CEO, Rakuten India

Dr. Shailesh Kumar

Chief Data Scientist, CoE AI/ML - Reliance Jio

Ravi-Vijayaraghavan

Senior Vice President and Head - Analytics & Decision Sciences (CDAO), Flipkart

Rohit Dewan

GM & CTO, Data and Commerce Platforms, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Utpal Chakraborty

Chief Data Scientist, Head of Artificial Intelligence, YES BANK

Dr. Sandeep Uttamchandani

Building AI products and platforms | CDO & VP of Engg - Unravel Data

Prof. Mausam

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi

James Mesbur

Senior Manager, Conversational AI, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Tsubasa Shiraishi

GM, IT Strategy Department, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Prof. Toyo Suzumura

Professor - University of Tokyo

Ashish Pandey

GM & SVP, AI Business and AI Products, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Kazuhito Nomura

GM, Data Science Consulting Department, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Bharath Shasthri

VP, Data Science & Engg, HDFC Bank

Hari Rao

Senior Vice President – Engineering, Rakuten India

Sekhar MK

Vice President, Rakuten India

Anirban Nandi

Vice President - Business Analytics, Rakuten India

Dr. Madan Dabbeeru

Senior Director - Research, Rakuten India

Sanjay Kar

Head Analytics, Equifax India

Goda Ramkumar

AVP, Data Science, Swiggy

Vinay TS

CEO & Founder, Streamingo.ai

Vijay Nair

Senior Director, Data Science & Analytics, Lowe's Companies, Inc.

Keyur Faldu

Chief Data Scientist, Embibe

Prof. Phaneendra K Yalavarthy

Professor, Computational and Data Sciences (CDS), IISc Bangalore

Pawan Kumar

Head Data Science & Analytics, Uber R&D India

Yusuke Kaji

Senior Manager, Analytics & Data Science, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Kyle Mede

Vice Manager, Customer Geo Science Group, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Mayank Bansal

Staff Data Scientist, Rakuten India

Muralidhar Sortur

Senior Principal Architect, Rakuten India

Vinay Jain

Senior Product Manager at Rakuten India

Todd Cao

Algorithms Team Lead, Visenze

Yu Hirate

Senior Manager, Rakuten Institute of Technology Tokyo, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Dr. Bharath Kumar Mohan

CEO, Sensara

Bjorn Stenger

Lead Scientist, Computer Vision & Machine Learning, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Ankur Datta

Director Data Science, Rakuten Group, Inc

Sandipan Chakraborty

Director Of Engineering, Global Data Platform, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Day 1 August 19,2021

09:00 - 09:10

Introduction

By Sunil Gopinath CEO, Rakuten India
09:10 - 09:15

Keynote

By Yasufumi Hirai CIO & CISO Group Executive VP, Rakuten Group, Inc.
09:15 - 09:45

Keynote

By Takuya Kitagawa Chief Data Officer, Rakuten Group, Inc.
09:45 - 10:30

Keynote

By Dr. Shailesh Kumar Chief Data Scientist, CoE AI/ML - Reliance Jio
10:30 - 10:45

Break / Engagement Activity
10:45 - 11:30

NLP & E-Commerce

By Ankur Datta Director Data Science, Rakuten Group, Inc.
10:45 - 11:30

AI for Enabling Hyperlocal Convenience

By Goda Ramkumar AVP, Data Science, Swiggy

A glimpse of what it takes to enable unparalleled convenience to Swiggy's customers and how AI powers decisions at each stage of the customer journey.
DATA SCIENCE PLATFORMS & ANALYTICS
10:45 - 11:30

98 things that can go wrong in an ML project

By Dr. Sandeep Uttamchandani Building AI products and platforms | CDO & VP of Engg - Unravel Data
11:30 - 12:15

Computer Vision Research at the Rakuten Institute of Technology

By Bjorn Stenger Lead Scientist, Computer Vision & Machine Learning, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Computer vision helps automating tasks at scale, by understanding relevant aspects of image or video content. In many cases scaling such tasks would be prohibitive, and they can now be carried at human-level accuracy. Applications include document processing for rapid user onboarding, product image classification and tagging, image quality control, and banner generation. This talk will provide an overview of vision research projects at the Rakuten Institute of Technology that help enabling frictionless customer experiences.
11:30 - 12:15

Personalisation & Contextualization In Offline Retail

By Vijay Nair Senior Director, Data Science & Analytics, Lowe's Companies, Inc.

Learn how the world's second-largest home improvement retailer helps customers love where they live. This talk will be focused on a couple of case studies where Lowe's has been able to improve customer engagement and, thereby, revenue through the use of ML and personalisation in the context of offline retail. This will also delve into challenges faced and the key learnings.
CUSTOMER & PRODUCT SCIENCES
11:30 - 12:15

Combating Syndicate Financial Fraud

By Bharath Shasthri VP, Data Science & Engg, HDFC Bank
12:15 - 13:00

The Promise of Neuro-Symbolic AI

By Prof. Mausam Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi
12:15 - 13:00

Explainable AI (XAI) And Its Business Applications

By Yusuke Kaji Senior Manager, Analytics & Data Science, Rakuten Group, Inc., Anirban Nandi Vice President - Business Analytics, Rakuten India

Explainable AI (XAI) tends to refer to the movement, initiatives, and efforts made in response to AI transparency and trust concerns, more than to a formal technical concept. Interpretable ML is one of the most talked-about topics in the AI domain, to convert the black-box algorithm into easy to comprehend solutions to improve adoption for real-life business problems. Interpretable ML is the degree to which a human can understand the cause of a decision. We plan to talk about some of the cutting edge algorithms in the world of Explainability. Interpretability/ during the conference, explaining the importance of this topic along with real business applications and examples.
DATA SCIENCE PLATFORMS & ANALYTICS
12:15 - 13:00

Customer Understanding

By Yu Hirate Senior Manager, Rakuten Institute of Technology Tokyo, Rakuten Group, Inc.
13:00 - 13:45

Generating metadata for the torso and tail of Entertainment Videos

By Dr. Bharath Kumar Mohan CEO, Sensara
13:00 - 13:45

Traffic 101: Why Does Traffic Matter In Routing?

By Pawan Kumar Head Data Science & Analytics, Uber R&D India

Routing diagnostics show traffic is the biggest cause of ETA errors. To improve Routing, ETAs, and Navigation, we need to improve our Traffic prediction accuracy. In this session, we will talk about i) how does traffic work? ii) How is traffic used in Routing? iii) why does traffic matter?
DATA SCIENCE PLATFORMS & ANALYTICS
13:00 - 13:45

Credit Scoring — Key Considerations For A Balanced Approach

By Sanjay Kar Head Analytics, Equifax India

The ever-evolving economic scenarios, regulatory framework, changing consumer behaviour, data availability are additional factors besides the analytical consideration for a credit score. Therefore, a credit score using the robust analytical technique while addressing these factors is key for its adoption.
CUSTOMER & PRODUCT SCIENCES
13:45 - 14:30

Data Privacy & Its Ramifications on Personalization

By Panelists (TBD)

Day 2 August 20,2021

09:00 - 09:05

Introduction

By Tsubasa Shiraishi GM, IT Strategy Department, Rakuten Group, Inc.
09:05 - 09:25

Keynote

By Rohit Dewan GM & CTO, Data and Commerce Platforms, Rakuten Group, Inc.
09:25 - 09:45

Keynote

By Ashish Pandey GM & SVP, AI Business and AI Products, Rakuten Group, Inc.
09:45 - 10:05

Data Accelerates Rakuten Ecosystem Business

By Kazuhito Nomura GM, Data Science Consulting Department, Rakuten Group, Inc.

Data is being leveraged by businesses to deep diving into customers' day-to-day life to understand their requirements and provide personalized solutions. Rakuten’s innovative frameworks combine big data with strategic business directions to create marketing solutions for brands which allows them to pinpoint their target users, as well as find the best possible ways to reach the target audience. Attend this session to explore how various dimensions of data science and analytics are being used to tackle real-life business problems in e-commerce, optimization of delivery logistics, and other interesting use cases. KEYNOTES
10:05 - 10:35

Keynote

By Ravi Vijayaraghavan Senior Vice President and Head - Analytics & Decision Sciences (CDAO), Flipkart
10:35 - 10:45

Break / Engagement Activity
10:45 - 11:30

Conquering Cancer

By Dr. Madan Dabbeeru Senior Director - Research, Rakuten India
10:45 - 11:30

Frictionless Online Shopping Using AI

By Todd Cao Algorithms Team Lead, Visenze
10:45 - 11:30

Rakuten Data Platform (Data Discovery, Data Utilization)

By Sandipan Chakraborty Director Of Engineering, Global Data Platform, Rakuten Group, Inc.
11:30 - 12:15

Mobile Friendly Deep Learning Algorithms for Medical Image Analysis

By Prof. Phaneendra K Yalavarthy Professor, Computational and Data Sciences (CDS), IISc Bangalore
11:30 - 12:15

Discovery of Insights using Video & AI

By Vinay TS CEO & Founder, Streamingo.ai
11:30 - 12:15

Knowledge Graphs and their use in AI

By Keyur Faldu Chief Data Scientist, Embibe

The recent advances in artificial intelligence are mainly attributed to deep learning models, which are intrinsically data-hungry and compute-hungry. Moreover, such deep learning models also suffer from black-box-ness, vulnerable understanding and reasoning ability, and intrinsic bias. All these factors limit its domain application. Explicit knowledge represented in knowledge graphs has a lot to offer. It could potentially drive the next surge in AI by addressing all of the above concerns. Let us brainstorm "Role of Knowledge Graphs in AI" with the education domain case study researched and developed at Embibe. CUSTOMER & PRODUCT SCIENCES
12:15 - 13:00

Quantum Technology & its Application

By Utpal Chakraborty Chief Data Scientist, Head of Artificial Intelligence, YES BANK

Quantum computing has the potential to transform every domain, every business and every aspect of our lives, and the Quantum-AI combination is going to be a bonanza for business. Let’s understand how. Google’s quantum computer ‘Sycamore’ was been able to solve a complex mathematical calculation in just 3 minutes that a powerful supercomputer would have taken approximately 10,000 years. We call it ‘Quantum Supremacy’ in the world of ‘Qubits’ when a quantum computer outperforms a classic supercomputer. Now we can easily imagine, that with this enormous computational speed combined with the power of AI how it’s going to bring about a radical change in the way we perceive classic computing today. A quantum computer is expected to be at least hundred million times faster than a classic computer. But it will be completely wrong if we think quantum computing will just bring extra speed because it will also bring some other significant dimensions specifically while combined with Machine Learning. Scientists and experts have already forecasted that Qubit in Quantum and Artificial Neurons in AI are going to essentially rule the scientific and technological arena of the future. We need to also understand that quantum computing is not just a boon but essentially the need of today and tomorrow because the silicon revolution is slowly collapsing as it has almost reached its limit. The rise of quantum along with AI is going to manifest the whole spectrum of new possibilities in the field of science and technology. Quantum computers can solve the wide range complex optimisation problems in each domain which conventional computing struggles to perform on time. These optimisation challenges are intrinsic in the field of finance, aviation, manufacturing, logistics, drug research and medicine, etc. ADVANCES IN AI
12:15 - 13:00

Conversational AI (Voice Assistants, chatbots)

By James Mesbur Senior Manager, Conversational AI, Rakuten Group, Inc.
12:15 - 13:00

Product Matching

By Hari Rao Senior Vice President – Engineering, Rakuten India, Muralidhar Sortur Senior Principal Architect, Rakuten India

Product Matching In E-Commerce, Product Matching is one of the fundamental problems for various use cases like (1) Competitive pricing of products, (2) Deduplication of products in the catalog, (3) Grouping items from various merchants (4) Recommending products. The requirement is to match a product accurately against a catalog spread across tens of thousands of taxonomy nodes and millions of items. Product matching results must be accurate, and the margin for error is minimal to use Product Matching across use cases. In this talk, we touch upon the “Six honest serving-men” by Rudyard Kipling –What, Why, How, Where, When, and Who of Product Matching. We share the overall approach, experience in designing and orchestrating Deep Learning models with a scalable architecture to achieve the required results. Here we have approached the problem at the grass-root level consisting of five stages (1) Identifying attributes per taxonomy node (2) Classification of Products (3) Attribute Enrichment from NER (Text) and Image feature extraction (4) Search against multiple indices and filter results for mandatory attributes (5) Re-rank to improve the relevancy of shortlisted results. We also address Product data quality, measured at every stage to improve the overall performance of Product Matching, towards meeting business needs. CUSTOMER & PRODUCT SCIENCES
13:00 - 13:45

Graph Neural Network (GNN)

By Prof. Toyo Suzumura Professor --University of Tokyo
13:00 - 13:45

Rakuten Data Science Platform and Feature store

By Sekhar MK Vice President, Rakuten India, Vinay Jain Senior Product Manager at Rakuten India
13:00 - 13:45

Geo Sciences Initiatives at Rakuten

By Kyle Mede Vice Manager, Customer Geo Science Group, Rakuten Group, Inc., Mayank Bansal Staff Data Scientist, Rakuten India

With more than 70 different services in the Rakuten Group globally, our data science teams cover diverse initiatives in both the online and offline worlds. Offline Geodata and Geo Science applications are key to optimization and overall success in the fields of Logistics, Site Planning, Area Marketing and improving Customer Experience and many more. In this talk, we will cover some of the Geo initiatives at Rakuten and discuss some interesting questions around the viability for online data to fully represent a user and how to potentially rectify that via offline data and data science. CUSTOMER & PRODUCT SCIENCES
13:45 - 14:00

CONFERENCE CLOSING

Rakuten Product Conference – Applied AI 2021

(THEME: APPLIED AI)

Speakers

More than 30 experts to speak at Rakuten Product Conference (Theme: Applied AI)