Rakuten, an internet service company in Japan, has a strategic R&D organization called Rakuten Institute of Technology, or RIT, which works on numerous research projects by considering the impact of new service trends on the technology utilization of business. The big service trends, such as long tail, cloud computing, big data and so on, have increasingly affected the leveraging of technology to internet services. And now, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is getting more and more attention because it is seen as the possibility of changing social infrastructure dramatically. This Keynote Presentation will give some examples of AI projects in RIT and will explain AI-based language learning tools on top of authentic foreign language content in our video streaming business, which is utilized by the National University of Singapore, and others as well. The tools employ state-of-the-art technologies and the treasure trove of Rakuten’s multilingual data. The presentation will also mention how an interdisciplinary team of experts in machine translation, computational linguistics, platform engineering, and cognitive psychology comes together to blend education with entertainment, transforming passive TV viewing into an opportunity for active learning.
