To give you a better idea of what Couger is all about, we are interviewing some of the staff who are currently working at Couger. In this second interview, we are interviewing Qiang Zhang, a natural language processing engineer working on LanguageCortex, an important feature of Couger's Ludens product.

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Please tell us about yourself.

My name is Qiang. I am from China and came to Japan after graduating from university. I majored in AI during my master's program at Kyoto University. At that time, I started thinking about looking for a job in Tokyo and later decided to work at Couger.

I worked full time for the first year and am currently working as a natural language processing engineer and researcher while attending a doctoral program at the University of Tokyo. My main work is developing dialogue systems for natural language processing.

Did you major in natural language processing at university?

Yes, I did. My master's degree is very broad, so natural language processing is one part of it. However, since I started working at Couger, I have become more interested in it, so I am studying it myself.

How long have you been working at Couger?

I started in April 2019, so it's been two years.

How did you first find the job at Cougar?

When I graduated from university, I had three options: the first option was to apply to a doctoral program at an American university, as I had wanted to go to the U.S. for a long time, but unfortunately, I did not receive a reply. The second option was to continue working in Japan, and the third was to return to China. Since I was already living in Japan, I decided to explore more here in Japan, so I chose the second option of working in Japan.

When I was looking for a job on the Internet, I considered big companies like Google and Microsoft. However, I wanted an experience that would challenge me more. If I joined a large company, I would generally be told what to do by someone else, follow the assigned tasks, and complete my duties. That is not what I wanted to do, so I thought about a venture where I could do meaningful work. I thought that building it up from scratch myself is much more challenging for me. With that in mind, I was considering a company involved in AI.

I found Couger on Linkedin and applied. The part that appealed to me was the Ludens project. I had studied Vitual Human Agent in my master's program so I thought a job at Couger would be a good fit for me.

So, you were looking for a job in the AI industry?

Yes, I was. Most of my classmates in the master's program went on to work for companies in other industries such as gaming industries, but I thought it was unsuitable for me because it seemed very disciplined. I think that working only within a strict regime lacks creativity. With that in mind, I decided to try my hand at creating something imaginative.

At first, there was something I noticed when I learned about Couger, and when I applied for the job, I wrote about how to improve the product that Couger was developing at the time. I think that was probably one of the reasons Couger was interested in me.