Kohei Iwamasa
Career Background
While majoring in biology at university and graduate school, I became actively involved in data analysis competitions such as Kaggle, solving machine learning tasks across various domains including image analysis, natural language processing, and tabular data analysis. My research involved quantifying plant leaf veins using image analysis and network analysis, and through part-time jobs and internships, I also built object recognition models for images and machine learning models for demand forecasting.
I participated in a one-month summer internship during my first year of master’s, and joined as a full-time employee the following year while completing my second year.
Why I Joined Turing
I decided to apply for the internship primarily because I wanted to work with a machine learning engineer who was a founding member — building autonomous driving was secondary at that point.
However, while working as an intern, I found the AI technology related to autonomous driving fascinating and became convinced that data-centric autonomous driving AI would be a future trend. Since few Japanese companies were pursuing this approach at the time, I decided to join with the desire to grow together both technically and as a business.
What I Do
- Building data pipelines
- Creating datasets for E2E model training
- Developing machine learning frameworks
- Prototyping model deployment and evaluation infrastructure
What Makes My Work Rewarding
It is the difficulty of developing autonomous driving systems and the enormous impact upon achievement. Machine learning tasks inherently face situations where performance does not reach required levels due to various conditions — insufficient data, poor data quality, or modeling challenges. Autonomous driving development is not a challenge that can be solved by machine learning alone; it is a difficult task that requires combining various technologies. However, if achieved, autonomous driving will have a tremendous social impact. This can create enormous value both in business and society, and that is what I find rewarding.
About the Work Environment at Turing
- With the in-office-first policy, communication is fast.
- Development environment improvements are constantly being made. We actively adopt coding agents, and improvements to workstation equipment like monitors and lighting are made quickly.
- We invest heavily in compute resources.
Who Thrives at Turing
- People who can deeply engage with challenges.
- People who can act proactively and involve others.
- People who can embrace change.
For Those Considering Turing
If you are considering an internship or joining as a new graduate, I recommend starting with an office tour or applying for a casual interview to get a sense of the company atmosphere and current technical capabilities. Even if you are not particularly interested in cars or autonomous driving, I think there is genuine fascination in the challenges we tackle at Turing, so let’s have a casual chat!
I want to work with people who not only have strong technical skills but have also proactively developed and acted while involving various people.
My Car
MAZDA3 FASTBACK
I decided to buy a car thinking that if we are aiming for autonomous driving, humans should be able to drive too. I chose the MAZDA3 because I love its cool exterior and the simple yet premium interior.
Cars I’d Like to Drive
Next, I want to try a car with strong ADAS capabilities.
