Ricoh Engineer Daisuke Maeda Wins Gold Medal in Kaggle Competition
A Ricoh engineer with a background in mechanical design has achieved major success in a global Kaggle competition through his work in artificial intelligence and mathematical optimization.
Daisuke Maeda, who works in robot mechanical design at Ricoh, developed his expertise in artificial intelligence and mathematical optimization to win a gold medal in the Santa 2025 - Christmas Tree Packing Challenge.
Success Beyond Mechanical Design
Ricoh runs initiatives such as the Ricoh Digital Academy and various professional certification programs to support employees in developing digital skills. Benefiting from these opportunities, Daisuke Maeda drew inspiration from challenges in his daily work processes to begin studying artificial intelligence and mathematical optimization.
Originally working on robot mechanical design, Daisuke Maeda successfully achieved major global success on Kaggle, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence platforms, thanks to these newly acquired competencies.
Santa 2025 Competition and Global Participation
Maeda's Kaggle journey gained momentum when he incorporated combinatorial optimization techniques into a drawing algorithm while developing a high-speed laser control system. He participated in the Santa 2025 - Christmas Tree Packing Challenge, held between November 2025 and January 2026.
Requiring an intense mathematical approach, this global event saw participation from 3,357 teams worldwide, and Maeda's team secured a significant achievement by finishing 10th in the overall standings.
A Ranking Achieved Through Artificial Intelligence and Teamwork
The competition required placing Christmas tree shapes of identical size and form into the smallest possible square across 200 different problems. Maeda initially entered the competition alone and reviewed existing research using artificial intelligence tools.
To raise his ranking, he later joined a four-person team that included a Kaggle Grandmaster. The team pursued a successful strategy by combining large-scale parallel computations and efficient candidate reduction methods.
New Business Areas and In-House Contributions
Now working in the MIOI Promotion Group within Ricoh, Daisuke Maeda contributes to the development of an artificial intelligence system that helps connect research themes with commercial opportunities.
His experiences on the Kaggle platform reinforced the importance of combining human judgment with artificial intelligence suggestions, properly structuring problems, and maintaining continuous collaboration.