Tomohiro Furusawa

A product manager who was born in library and information science and raised in data science, and is a software engineer. Enjoys search, recommendation, and organizational theory.

About

I have been involved in product development related to search and recommendation systems since my university days, with a background in library and information science. After graduating from graduate school, I joined Recruit Co., Ltd. as a data scientist, where I worked on tasks ranging from implementing machine learning in existing services to developing new businesses. Since 2019, I have been working at Mercari, Inc. as a data scientist, focusing on improving search systems. Later on, I transitioned to the role of a software engineer at the same company, where I worked on developing large-scale recommendation systems. In parallel, I promoted team development as a Scrum Master and have been driving product development as a Product Manager.

Publications, Articles, and Awards

Books and Papers

Tomoko Uchida, Tomohiro Furusawa, Jun Oya, Ryo Kato, Shogo Suzuki, Shinzaku Kono. Search Systems: A Development and Improvement Guide for Practitioners. Lambda Note. May 2, 2022, 1st Edition
Introduction to Search Engineering for Library and Information Science Geeks. Released on February 26, 2020
Tomohiro Furusawa, Mamiko Matsubayashi, Tetsuji Satoh. Users’ preferences for answer forms to reference questions in libraries. iiWAS ‘16, Singapore, November 28 - 30, 2016
Tomohiro Furusawa, Mamiko Matsubayashi, Tetsuji Satoh. General Public’s Expectations for Answer Formats of Reference Questions. Annual Conference of the Japan Society of Library and Information Science, May 28, 2016
Tomohiro Furusawa, Mamiko Matsubayashi, Tetsuji Satoh. Differences between Reference Questions in Libraries and Questions on Q&A Sites. Jointly Co-organized by the Information Processing Society of Japan, The 7th Forum on Data Engineering and Information Management, DEIM2015, A1-5 (Mar. 2015).

Interview Articles

Awards

July 2023 - Mercari, Inc. MVP Award (Janualy-June 2023)
September 2022 - Digital Hack Day 2022 Finalist (Top 10 out of 77 teams)
February 2022 - Mercari, Inc. MVP Award (June-December 2021)
October 2021 - Digital Hack Day 2021 First Prize (¥3,000,000 prize)
March 2021 - Mercari Hack Week Bronze Award
March 2020 - Mercari Hack Week Gold Award
December 2018 - Yahoo! JAPAN Hack Day 2018 Tech Award
June 2018 - SPAJAM2018 Tokyo B Preliminary Outstanding Award
May 2018 - AngelHack Tokyo 2018 LINE Award / IBM Award / Grand Prize
December 2017 - Yahoo! JAPAN Hack Day 10th Anniv. Hackathon Tech Award
June 2017 - SPAJAM2017 Tokyo C Preliminary Best Award
May 2017 - Full Exemption of First Class Scholarship for Graduate Students
March 2017 - Dean’s Commendation, Graduate School of Library, Information and Media Studies
February 2017 - Yahoo! JAPAN Hack Day 2017 Outstanding Award
December 2016 - Mirai Media Camp 2016 Mirai Media Camp Award (Hosted by Asahi Shimbun, Special Cooperation: Keio University SDM Research School, Cooperation: Think the Earth)
November 28-29, 2015 - Hacker Wars Grand Prize, Jigen Corporation Award
September 2-4, 2015 - DMM Ideathon + Hackathon Individual Award Runner-up MVP, Team 2nd Place
March 2015 - Dean’s Commendation, Faculty of Informatics, University of Tsukuba

Work Experience

Mercari, Inc. — Product Manager

Product Team · Japan

April 2022 - Present

Developed and executed product strategies for the discovery experience.
Strategized and drove the direction of the entire home screen and recommendation feature.

Mercari, Inc. — Scrum Master / Software Engineer

AI/Personalization Team · Japan

May 2020 - June 2022

Introduced Scrum to product teams and improved team development processes in a remote setup.
Worked on the development, operation, and enhancement of large-scale recommendation systems.

Mercari, Inc. — Data Scientist

Data Science Team · Japan

May 2019 - April 2020

Developed strategies for search improvement and designed experiments for effectiveness measurement.
Established evaluation release workflows for search and recommendations.
Proof of Concept (PoC) for recommendation features.
Initiated the Recommendation Team.

Recruit Co., Ltd. — Data Scientist

Data Management Department · Japan

April 2017 - April 2019

Built systems using machine learning to improve search paths on existing websites.
Maintained and operated advertising operation systems utilizing machine learning.

Internship Experience

Japan

2015 - 2016

March 2016 - pixiv 2016 SPRING BOOT CAMP

Planned and implemented email strategies to prevent user attrition.

March 2016 - Sonnet Media Networks

Conducted data analysis on DSP logs and prototyped a violation detection system using machine learning.

February 2016 - Recruit Holdings Internship

Participated in the Data Analyst course, conducted data analysis related to user behavior logs on websites using Python, among other tasks.

August-September 2015 - DMM.com Lab

Created smartphone app APIs using PHP as a server-side engineer.

Part Time Experience

Japan

2015 - 2016

June 2015-February 2016 - University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Informatics, Knowledge Information and Library Studies Programming Exercise TA

Teaching Assistant for programming classes (Language: Ruby).

Education

University of Tsukuba, Graduate School of Library, Information and Media Studies — Master of Information Science

April 2015 - March 2017

Conducted research on people’s expectations for Q&A services through a comparison of the Reference Service, a library Q&A service, with Q&A sites like Yahoo! Chiebukuro. The research findings were recognized and the results were accepted at international conferences.

University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Informatics, Knowledge Information and Library Studies — Bachelor of Library and Information Science

April 2011 - March 2015

Studied the field of “Library and Information Science,” which focuses on the systematic organization of technology and knowledge for collecting, organizing, storing, and providing the overflow of information and knowledge in the world. Conducted research on social media and Q&A services.