Dr. Ewa Szymanska leads development of new technologies as the Global Head of Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT) and Executive Officer at Rakuten. She is responsible for bridging academic research with business applications to drive innovation at Rakuten and to deliver novel solutions utilizing latest findings in computer vision, natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, and advanced customer analytics, across RIT offices in Tokyo, Singapore, Bengaluru, Paris, Boston, and San Mateo. Prior to her global role, Ewa established and led RIT office in Singapore, with focus on machine translation and languages learning technologies. Before Rakuten, Ewa was a founding member of data monetization group at Singtel (Singapore Communications), established to create new revenue streams for one of Asia’s largest telcos. Prior to SingTel, Ewa was with General Mills’ Consumer Insights in Minneapolis, USA, analysing shopping trends at key retail channels and bringing Voice of Customer to cross-functional teams for strategic planning. Prior to that, she worked at the digital marketing consultancy in New York analysing e-commerce opportunities in health and wellness.
Ewa received her PhD in Psychology of Decision Making from the University of Pennsylvania, USA.