[AISC Introduction] A Person Who Focused More on Research Than Development During His Student Years Now Marks His Fifth Year as a DX Engineer

Here is English version.
日本語版はこちら。

Hello, my name is Shota Yamauchi from AISC. During my student years, I was part of the Faculty of Engineering’s Information Science Department, focusing primarily on research in natural language processing and machine learning. At the time, my activities were more research-oriented than system development, but now, as a DX engineer, I primarily work on development tasks. In this article, I would like to introduce the research I engaged in as a student and the work I do now, and finally share my thoughts on working at AISC.
This article is the fifth installment in the AISC introduction series. It builds on the previous article (the fourth installment) about AISC’s development training, so please check it out as well.

https://note.com/cute_iris436/n/n56ebca911c11

You can check out the entire series here.

Research During My Student Years

During my graduate studies, I belonged to a medical informatics laboratory. This lab primarily focused on research centered around the use of technology in the medical field, which allowed for relatively free selection of research topics within the domain of healthcare.
I worked on research aimed at encouraging people who hesitate to visit hospitals to seek medical consultation. Specifically, I developed a system that estimates the possible illness based on symptoms and recommends seeking medical attention if there is a possibility of a serious condition. I also examined the impact of different types of bot behavior on human decision-making.
Through this research, I was able to deepen my knowledge in fields such as natural language processing, informatics, and machine learning, though my development skills didn’t improve much.

Development Training after Joining GA

At AISC, there is a development training program before starting actual work. By passing this training, even new graduates who didn’t gain many development skills during their student years can become capable of developing MVPs (Minimum Viable Products). For me, as someone who didn’t have much development experience in school, this training was incredibly valuable. At that time, app development within the company primarily used Ruby on Rails, and the training heavily focused on Rails (for the current 2024 content, please refer to Mr. Shirato’s article). Additionally, we learned frontend development topics like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with essential development tools such as Git and Docker. It took me about two and a half months to complete the training, though one colleague completed it in just one and a half months (earning my respect).

First Task

My first task upon joining GA was building a parking search system for luxury apartments. After interviewing sales representatives for high-end rentals, I learned that customers living in luxury properties often own large vehicles, and whether their car fits in the parking space greatly influences their choice of property. This led to the idea that a system allowing property searches based on car size could be useful, which became the starting point for this project. The system itself was easy to create using the Rails app development skills I learned in training, but unfortunately, we couldn’t gather the most critical data with enough quality, and the project was discontinued. This experience taught me that programming skills alone are not enough to complete a project. However, it was an invaluable learning experience for me, as I was able to understand on-site needs through interviews and propose solutions based on those needs.

Current Task

Currently, I am working on improving the operational efficiency of the rental management department. The work in rental management is complex, but to put it simply: I am creating systems to automate simple tasks that don’t require human involvement, allowing the team to focus on more specialized work. Compared to my first task, the content of my work has changed significantly, but I feel the approach remains the same. First, I conducted interviews on-site to learn about the tasks and challenges. Then, I identified areas where technology could improve efficiency and provide concrete solutions. The people in the GA Group are incredibly supportive and actively help in sharing task details and aligning on problem-solving proposals. This is one of the wonderful aspects of the GA Group.

In Conclusion

The skills I developed through research are certainly valuable in solving business challenges. However, I personally feel that relying solely on these skills can be risky. Technology evolves with the times, and some tools and techniques may become obsolete or commoditized. For example, there was a time when simply being able to work with machine learning was considered a specialty, but now we’re in an era where anyone can easily leverage machine learning using no-code tools. Therefore, beyond the ability to achieve results in research, I believe that development skills to translate research outcomes into practical solutions are crucial for research teams in business settings.