[No. 203] Naoki Shimizu

I would like to express my gratitude for the opportunity to write for the Keio Alumni Relay Column.

After graduating from the Department of Information and Computer Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, and completing my master's degree, I now work as a software engineer in the United States. In this article, I will reflect on how my experiences at Keio University have connected to my subsequent career.

When I was in junior high and high school, personal computers, mobile phones, and the internet were becoming commonplace. While I felt how the internet was making it more convenient to search for information and communicate with friends, the world of how these things worked and who was creating them was unknown to me. One day, I saw a TV special about Silicon Valley companies. I was struck by the sight of people from all over the world coming together to realize a grand vision through the power of technology. I felt that I wanted to be involved on the creation side, not just using products that improve people's lives, and decided I wanted to study computer science at university.

On the other hand, I was passionate about rugby, which I started in high school, and I also had a desire to challenge myself in a high-level league in college. Keio University's Rugby Football Club was a powerhouse team belonging to the Kanto University Rugby Championship A-Group, and players from science and engineering faculties were also active on the team. For these reasons, I decided to enter the Department of Information and Computer Science at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, where I could study computer science while also challenging myself in a high-level rugby environment.

In the Department of Information and Computer Science, I learned a wide range of computer science topics through lectures and experiments. In my university classes, I learned the theory of how computers work and how to build hardware and software myself. I was delighted by the feeling of unraveling the mechanisms of the computers I had been familiar with since childhood, and I looked forward to every class.

For my fourth-year laboratory assignment, I joined the lab of Professor Hideo Saito, who specializes in computer vision, the field of recognizing and understanding images with computers. For my graduation research, I studied a frame synchronization method for depth cameras and regular cameras, a technology that has now become common enough to be installed in smartphones. As an application of this method, I also worked on generating free-viewpoint video of sports using multiple cameras and depth cameras. In this research, I was able to utilize not only my knowledge of computer vision but also the insights I gained through my club activities, such as what kind of sports footage is useful for viewing and analysis.

The four years I spent in the Faculty of Science and Technology were also days spent immersed in activities with the Rugby Football Club. The days spent striving to become the university champions of Japan, competing with over 170 members, are an irreplaceable experience. In the Keio-Waseda match of my final year, my fourth year of university, we were able to achieve our first victory over Waseda University in 10 years. The sight of the final whistle signaling the end of the match is one of the best moments of my life, and I still remember it clearly.

In graduate school, I continued my research on depth cameras. In graduate school, most classes were conducted in English, about half of the students in my lab were international students, and our usual meetings and presentations were also in English. This multinational and English-centric environment was a new experience for me, as I had never studied abroad.

Encouraged by the international environment in my lab, I was also blessed with opportunities for activities abroad. In 2012, I stayed at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and was involved in a project applying depth cameras to the field of medical education. We developed an AR skeleton puzzle, an educational game for learning the structure of the human skeleton, where players move their bodies to fit a CG-displayed skeleton onto their own. The results of this project were accepted at the international conference IEEE VR, which gave me the confidence that the skills I had learned in Japan could be applied in a multinational team and that my work could be recognized overseas.

After completing my master's program, I joined DeNA Co., Ltd. (DeNA), a company that provides various internet-related services. Unlike the theoretical verification and experimental software development for its application in graduate school, web service development emphasizes development efficiency in large teams and stable system operation. By participating in numerous projects, I was able to learn the know-how of developing and operating large-scale services. I was thrilled by the experience of collaborating with a team to develop and release software, and seeing the programs I wrote being used by millions of people. This feeling remains a major motivation for my work today.

On the other hand, I sometimes felt nostalgic for the international projects I worked on in graduate school. Amidst this, at the 2015 Rugby World Cup, I witnessed the great success of the Japanese national rugby team, including Akihito Yamada, who was three years my senior in the Keio University Rugby Football Club. I was deeply moved and excited by the sight of the players on the stage of their victory against South Africa, a major upset that will go down in sports history. This event inspired me to want to take on challenges abroad in my own field, and the following year I joined Mercari, Inc. At that time, Mercari was beginning to focus on international expansion and had just established a base in Silicon Valley in the US. After joining the company, I was engaged in developing the US version of the Mercari service.

In 2017, I moved to San Francisco to contribute to the expansion of the US business. One of the attractions of San Francisco and the surrounding Silicon Valley area is that people from all over the world gather there. Interacting with people from diverse backgrounds, both inside and outside the company, was a valuable experience that allowed me to incorporate new values beyond the common sense I had cultivated in Japan. In 2018, my position changed from software engineer to manager. Developing a service and building an organization as a manager in a country different from the one where I was born and raised was a series of difficulties, but the business was able to grow to many times its size in both sales and organization compared to when I first came to the US. What remains particularly memorable is airing our company's TV commercial during the Super Bowl, the national championship game of American football, in 2021. That the organization had grown to the point where it could advertise on the most-watched broadcast in the world was something I could not have imagined when I first came to the US.

In 2022, I changed roles again, returning from manager to software engineer. The ability to pursue diverse career paths, without necessarily having to remain in a management position to advance one's career, is another attraction of this place. My immediate goal is to continue creating as many products as possible that can be used by people all over the world.

Looking back on my career from my university days to the present, I realize that I would not be who I am today if any one of these elements were missing: being able to balance my studies in computer science with my activities in the Rugby Football Club, my international research activities in graduate school, and more. I am grateful to my professors and friends at the time for providing me with such an environment. I hope this article will be a helpful reference for prospective and current students in choosing their career paths.