Machine Learning Engineer · Tokyo, Japan

Taiju Watanabe 渡部 泰樹

Data Scientist / ML Engineer

View experience

01. Career Timeline

Experience

Jul 2026 - Present

Current

Preferred Networks

LLM Application Engineer (Full-time)

Jul 2026 - Present
  • LLM Application Engineer

Apr 2025 - Jun 2026

Matsuo Institute

Data Scientist (Full-time)

Apr 2025 - Jun 2026
  • Delivered contract development using LLMs for automotive, housing, investment, and business operations clients.

Dec 2023 - Mar 2025

Matsuo Institute Robotics Project

Intern

Dec 2023 - Mar 2025
  • Reimplemented the autonomous driving model Gaia-1.
  • Owned the text encoder and world model conditioning components for text-to-video prediction.
  • Worked on robotic control with world models and MPC.

Dec 2023 - Sep 2024

Matsuo Institute Pharmaceutical Company Project

Intern

Dec 2023 - Sep 2024
  • Researched improvements to clinical trial success-rate prediction with deep learning.

Jul 2023 - Mar 2024

Sony CSL

Intern

Jul 2023 - Mar 2024
  • Conducted research and development on grammatical error correction.

Aug 2023

NTT Research

Intern

Aug 2023
  • Researched open-set recognition.

Jun 2023 - Dec 2023

Almondo

Intern

Jun 2023 - Dec 2023
  • Worked on LLM-driven DX projects for construction sites.

Jul 2022 - Nov 2023

The University of Tokyo Matsuo-Iwasawa Lab, Large-Scale World Model Project

Intern

Jul 2022 - Nov 2023
  • Studied whether scaling laws can apply to world models.
  • Surveyed, implemented, and scaled multiple world model approaches.

Aug 2021 - Mar 2024

The University of Tokyo Matsuo-Iwasawa Lab, Academic Institution Project

Intern

Aug 2021 - Mar 2024
  • Improved operational efficiency for a social cooperation program connecting the University of Tokyo Faculty of Engineering with companies.
  • Extracted technical terms with natural language processing.
  • Operated databases with SQL.
  • Built a web application with PHP, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript.

Jul 2021 - Dec 2022

Lazuli

Intern

Jul 2021 - Dec 2022
  • Analyzed e-commerce sites using natural language processing and crawling.

Jan 2021 - Jul 2021

Datasection

Intern

Jan 2021 - Jul 2021
  • Conducted research and development on image recognition and OCR.

Jan 2021 - Mar 2021

Asilla

Intern

Jan 2021 - Mar 2021
  • Conducted research and development on pose estimation.

Sep 2020 - Jun 2021

Zero2one

Intern

Sep 2020 - Jun 2021
  • Created English questions for the JDLA G Test.
  • Created the Japanese edition of Andrew Ng's Coursera course AI For Everyone.

02. Education

Academic foundation

A mathematical and information-science foundation for research and engineering work.

2023 - 2025

Waseda University Graduate School

Department of Computer Science and Communications Engineering, Fundamental Science and Engineering

2019 - 2023

Waseda University

Department of Applied Mathematics, School of Fundamental Science and Engineering

Minor: Computer Science and Engineering

03. Selected work

Projects

Research and engineering work spanning large language models and video intelligence.

04. Speaking

Talks

Community talks and public conversations on machine learning research and practice.

01

Shirokane Kogyo Meetup

BrainPad Meetup

Details 02

Matsuo Lab LLM Community Paper&Hacks Vol.64

YouTube

Watch 03

Matsuo Lab LLM Community Paper&Hacks Vol.72

YouTube

Watch

05. Credentials

More

Professional qualifications and ongoing contributions to the machine learning community.

Qualifications

Certifications

  • JDLA Deep Learning for GENERAL 2020#2
  • JDLA Deep Learning for ENGINEER 2022#1
  • EIKEN Grade 1

Community

Achievements & activities

Completed Matsuo Lab GCI 2020 Summer
TA for Matsuo Lab GCI from 2021 Summer to 2024 Summer
TA for Matsuo Lab GCI Global Lecturer for Matsuo Lab GCI 2023 Summer & Winter
Completed Matsuo Lab Summer School on Image Recognition 2021
Completed Matsuo Lab Summer School on Deep Generative Models 2021
Completed Matsuo Lab Reinforcement Learning Autumn Seminar 2021
Completed Matsuo Lab Deep Learning Basics Course 2021
Completed Matsuo Lab World Models and Intelligence 2021, Best Oral Presentation Award
Completed Matsuo Lab AI Engineering Course 2025