Rakuten Group, Inc. Announcement of “Rakuten Technology Excellence Award 2024”

[Rakuten Group, Inc.] Announces “Rakuten Technology Excellence Award 2024” ​ Rakuten Group, Inc. Press release: November 11, 2024 “Rakuten Technology Excellence Award 2024” announced Rakuten Group, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as “Rakuten”) is pleased to announce that the winners of the “Rakuten Technology Excellence Award 2024” have been selected. Additionally, on Saturday, November 16th, an awards ceremony will be held at the technology event “Rakuten Technology Conference 2024” held by Rakuten (official page: https://tech.rakuten.co.jp

). The “Rakuten Technology Excellence Award” is an award ceremony that recognizes individuals or organizations that have brought innovation to society through advanced technology. This year, the 15th time to be held, the theme is “AI-nization 4.all” and three “Excellence Awards” will be presented. “AI-nization 4.all” means that through this event, Rakuten will further promote “AI-nization,” a term coined to represent AI, and aim for the “democratization of AI,” where everyone around the world can utilize AI. It represents what you are aiming for. “Rakuten Technology Excellence Award 2024″ Excellence Award Awarded to individuals or organizations who have promoted the evolution of society through technology in their respective industries or fields. [Award winner] GMO Cyber ​​Security by Ierae Co., Ltd. GMO Cyber ​​Security by Ierae Co., Ltd. is a cybersecurity company that develops cyber attack countermeasures business. The company’s vulnerability research and research team “GMO Ierae” won two years in the “Cloud Village CTF,” a point-based competition for cloud security
technologies held at the world’s largest cybersecurity conference “DEF CON 32.” Reached number 1 in the world consecutively. At a time when ensuring Internet safety is becoming more and more important, this remarkable achievement is a testament to the technical
capabilities and expertise of this team, and the efforts of these outstanding engineers are important in our daily lives. It has become an essential element that supports life. The company has made a significant contribution to the Japanese cybersecurity industry, and we hope that its success will lead to further technological innovation and security enhancement. [Award winner] Preferred Networks, Inc. Preferred Networks, Inc. is an AI company that develops and provides products that combine software technologies such as deep learning and hardware technologies such as computing platforms. The company provides open source software (OSS) such as Optuna, an automatic hyperparameter (Note 1) optimization framework, and CuPy, a
general-purpose array calculation library for Python that facilitates GPU matrix calculations. It has received high praise from researchers. In addition, the company is actively promoting the construction and provision of large-scale language models, and in October of this year, it released the 100 billion-parameter large-scale language model “PLaMo-100B-Pretrained” for academic and research use. Published under a non-commercial license and a commercial license for commercial use. By releasing these excellent products, we are contributing to the development of the entire industry. Furthermore, in addition to software, we are also working to improve the performance and lower power consumption of AI using hardware, such as announcing that we will commercialize a semiconductor for inference processing of generative AI in 2026. [Award winner] LlamaIndex LlamaIndex is an AI company that develops and provides a RAG (Search Augmentation and Generation) framework that facilitates the collaboration of generative AI models and external data. The company has released the RAG framework as OSS, which has functions such as a data framework (Note 2) compatible with a variety of storage systems, flexible index (Note 3) creation, and advanced workflow management. In order to build a generative AI system that reflects the information accumulated in your company and the latest information, it is common to use the RAG method. The company’s framework greatly simplifies the development of generative AI systems using RAG, and is used by AI developers and researchers around the world. The company’s advanced technology makes it possible to flexibly create unique AI models optimized for a variety of use cases, contributing to expanding the possibilities of generative AI and natural language processing (NLP). [Judging Committee] Chairman: Rakuten Group, Inc. Chairman and President Hiroshi Mikitani Committee member: Rakuten Group, Inc. Senior Managing Executive Officer Akihito Kurozumi Committee member: Rakuten Group, Inc. Senior Managing Executive Officer Ting Tsai Rakuten Technology Conference Team Through this award, Rakuten will continue to support individuals and organizations that are working on the innovative evolution of technology and the promotion of innovation. (Note 1) Refers to parameters that are manually set in advance to manage the behavior of machine learning models. (Note 2) Refers to a framework or template for managing data in a certain format. (Note 3) Refers to a data structure prepared within the system for efficient information retrieval. ■“Rakuten Technology Conference 2024” event overview ・Name: “Rakuten Technology Conference 2024” ・Date and time: Saturday, November 16, 2024 10:00-18:00 *The “Rakuten Technology Excellence Award 2024” award ceremony will be held from 17:00 to 18:00. ・Venue: Rakuten Crimson House (Headquarters) (1-14-1 Tamagawa, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 158-0094) https://corp.rakuten.co.jp/about/map/crimsonhouse/ ・Sponsor: Rakuten Group, Inc. ・Official website URL:
https://tech.rakuten.co.jp/ ・Participation application URL:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rakuten-technology-conference-2024-tickets-1012141661957 That’s all *The information posted here is current as of the date of announcement. Please note that the information may differ from the latest information.