Notes on Takuya Kitazawa

Freakonomics Radio's recent Goes Back To School series was eye-opening as the episodes nicely highlighted how top-tier U.S. universities are operated like "business" by trying to differentiate their products to win the market while preserving their rarity…

Nowadays, our day-to-day decisions rely too much on how others think.

I recently found Microsoft's Recommenders repository is particularly useful to understand common discussion points when it comes to recommender systems.

It's Mental Health Week in Canada.

Canadian friend: "Do you know John Macdonald?"

I, as an ethical product developer, consider a product or project is "bad" when any of the following conditions are met: End user is physically absent from the design process.

After reviewing several scientific evidence showing the fact, I'm urgently seeking a way to break my loneliness.

When it comes to building data-driven applications, evaluation matters.

As Key Takeaways from UMich's Data Science Ethics Course told us, ethics is defined by social consensus.

One of the most important takeaways from UMich's "Data Science Ethics" on Coursera is that ethics is defined by social consensus.

Web 3.0, which commonly refers to the technological trends around blockchain and NFTs, is not a substitute for today's Web 2.0 technology (yet).

As I've been discussing over the last months, I personally believe measuring non-accuracy aspects of intelligent systems is one of the most important challenges to make algorithmic recommendations ethical.

In the modern personalization systems, diversifying what's recommended to individual users is crucial not only for maximizing customer satisfaction and business metrics but incorporating proper ethics and fairness into the applications.

When it comes to modern machine learning and data analytics applications, I cannot stress the importance of data validation enough.

This week, I have created a new page takuti.me/now.

I strongly believe having solid "Definition of Done" is critical at a wide variety of occasions, including not only at business but for our personal life, but it's underappreciated in practice.

Nowadays, there is almost no question that data is the new oil.

I have been practicing the rule of three on a variety of occasions (e.g., business, research, blog, product narrative) for 10 years since (if I remember correctly) "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" first told me that having a clear list of 3-4 key…

It clearly goes beyond how it’s been normally discussed in business, and that’s why my recent interest is outside of traditional accuracy/business metrics that we can “easily” optimize.

This week I have released version 0.4.0 of Recommendation.jl, a library for recommender systems in Julia.

I'm consciously calling myself as a "product developer" to emphasize a desire that I am not just a software developer, data scientist, product manager, or machine learning engineer.

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who has read my blog posts this year and commented on LinkedIn, Twitter, or even during a virtual/in-person chat.

I rarely read the same book multiple times, and in 2021, Atomic Habits was one of them.

As I summarized in "User-Centricity Matters: My Reading List from RecSys 2021", the field of recommender systems has clearly entered a new phase of research trend that focuses more on their downstream impact, and it is particularly interesting to see that…

If you have ever worked on supply chain in some way, it won't take too long to realize how complex and fragile the system is; numerous variables including environmental condition, labour force, local/global supply-demand seasonality are contributing to ma…

One of the biggest drawbacks of returning to software engineer from product manager is a significant decrease in the frequency of human interactions.

Dependency Injection (DI) is a well-known design pattern that creates and binds dependent objects outside of a class.

In September, I experimentally tracked what I ate (foods, calories, and their macros) through the Fitbit app1.

Conference season is here, and RecSys is back.

When it comes to sustainable capitalism, the role of big companies is particularly important because they have the exceptional power of advancing sustainability in the long-run.

There is a common myth that "sustainability" and "capitalism" are contradictory.

As a foreign worker who has been in the country only for half a year, there is nothing much to say about the ongoing Canadian federal election campaign.

After playing with interactive data visualization using D3.js and React, I wanted to have a "Download" function so that I can easily save the visualization as an image rather than taking a screenshot of a browser window: Practicing D3 Interactive Data Vis…

After five years of dramatic days at Treasure Data (TD), I decided to leave the company and join Amazon's Personalization team in Vancouver as a software engineer.

Recently, I happened to be "categorized" by my past and current job titles a lot, during the immigration and job interview process1.

As I captured in Understanding Research Trends in Recommender Systems from Word Cloud, many real-life applications are nowadays applying recommendation techniques to a wide variety of datasets and scenarios.

Given a sorted array arr, Array Bisection Algorithm (a.k.a.

Otherwise, I have a feeling that the job of product management is likely to be a bullshit job.

It's been almost 3 months after moving to Canada.

Driving business towards the Sustainable Development Goals offered by Erasmus University Rotterdam was one of the best online courses I've ever taken.

After deepening my knowledge about Supply Chain Management, I became particularly curious about how data helps supply chain management.

One of the key insights I gained from Bill Gates's "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" is that the next economic leader in the world is an innovator in the global environmental management field.

I have been following Bill Gates's activities against environmental problems since I watched Inside Bill's Brain on Netflix last year, and I just finished reading his latest book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

In "What Blockchain Brings to Real-World Applications", I learned blockchain basics ranging from cryptography and hashing to smart contracts and decentralized applications using the Solidity programming language.

I have completed Blockchain Specialization offered by University at Buffalo on Coursera.

On Coursera, I have completed Supply Chain Management Specialization offered by Rutgers University, which consists of four different topics in an end-to-end supply chain management process: Logistics Operations Planning Sourcing The series of courses gave…

On Feb 26, 2021, I have officially moved to Metro Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada from Japan under continuous employment with Treasure Data, where I have been working for 4+ years.

Before reading further, play with an interactive data visualization app that I implemented with D3.js & React: Flight Emissions Calculator It's been a while since the COVID-19 pandemic arose, and one of the biggest changes in my life was a significant red…

Thanks to a pull-request "Install TagBot as a GitHub Action", which was created by a bot, I realized now is the time to move one of my Julia projects, Recommendation.jl, from Travis CI to GitHub Actions.

As I introduced in Datavis 2020: A Free Online Course About D3.js & React, the online course told me the basics of how to effectively and efficiently create interactive data visualization using D3 and React.