Research Engineer
Contact: shuhei.watanabe.utokyo [at] gmail.com
I am a research engineer at the AutoML group of Preferred Networks Inc. Before joining the group, I was studying under the supervision of Prof. Frank Hutter at the University of Freiburg in Computer Science department. The main interests of my research are practical extensions of blackbox optimization on expensive functions. More specifically, I have been tackling multi-objective optimization, constraint optimization, meta-learning of hyperparameter optimization, and the interpretation of optimizations.
Prior to the Master course, I finished the Bachelor at the University of Tokyo, Systems Innovation Faculty supervised by Prof. Chen Yu in March 2020. During my Bachelor, I was engaged in the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) supervised by Masaki Onishi.
I love MineSweeper, having motivated me to create the game itself in TypeScript and its solver.
Please take a look at My Skill Page for more details.
I have worked on optimization both in academia and industry. Although my publications strongly lean toward Bayesian optimization, classical optimization knowledge, such as (quasi-) Newton method, and (mixed-integer) linear programming, is also essential for the acquisition function optimization.
I was also intensively working on real-world applications of Bayesian optimization, including the extensions of TPE to multi-objective optimization, constrained optimization, and meta-learning setups, and materials discovery and Sim2Real transfer applications. Importantly, these applications require significant engineering efforts and dirty work to enhance the practical performance through trial and error. The dirty work necessitates convenient tools for analysis, and one of the tools inspired during these works is PED-ANOVA accepted to IJCAI'23.