NEC Laboratories America, Inc. (NEC Labs America), formerly known as NEC Research Institute (1988 – 2002), is the US-based center for

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

Corporation’s global network of corporate research laboratories. It was established in 1988 with the primary location in

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of w ...

and subsequently, a second location in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area G ...

, specifically San Jose, California. The lab is a subsidiary of the

NEC Corporation of America NEC Corporation of America (NECAM) is the principal subsidiary of the multinational IT company NEC in the United States. NEC Corporation of America was formed on July 1, 2006, from the combined operations of NEC America, NEC Solutions (America) ...

, headquartered in

Irving, Texas Irving is a city in the U.S. state of Texas. Located in Dallas County, it is also an inner ring suburb of Dallas. The city of Irving is part of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. According to a 2019 estimate from the United States Census Bureau ...

. Its mission is to generate significant new knowledge and create innovative solutions for society in collaboration with industry, academia, and governments. Most research results from NEC Labs America are published in the open scientific literature.

History

NEC Labs America was created through the merger of the NEC Research Institute (NECI) and the NEC C&C Research Laboratories (CCRL). NECI was founded in 1988 to conduct long-term basic research in sciences underlying the computer and communications (C&C) technologies of the future. Its founding board was composed of thought leaders in computing and physical sciences, includin
Joseph Giordmaine

C. William Gear C. William Gear (Charles William "Bill" Gear; 1 February 1935, in London – 15 March 2022, in Princeton, New Jersey) was a British-American mathematician who specialized in numerical analysis and computer science. Gear was an American citizen. Ge ...

Stuart Solin

Peter Wolff Peter Wolff (born 10 May 1946) is a politician and attorney from Liechtenstein. He was the Speaker of the Landtag of Liechtenstein (the national Parliament) from January 1997 to December 2000. Wolff belongs to the Patriotic Union and represente ...

Robert Tarjan Robert Endre Tarjan (born April 30, 1948) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the discoverer of several graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line lowest common ancestors algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees ...

and

Leslie Valiant Leslie Gabriel Valiant (born 28 March 1949) is a British American computer scientist and computational theorist. He was born to a chemical engineer father and a translator mother. He is currently the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Comput ...

, with the goal of making important contributions to the basic research community and applying their results to improve the quality of human life. CCRL was established in Oct 1991 under the leadership of Kojiro Watanabe and its Silicon Valley Office, headed by Yoshinori Hara, was established in Aug 1995. NECI and CCRL merged in 2002. Initial research areas in the

physical sciences Physical science is a branch of natural science that studies non-living systems, in contrast to life science. It in turn has many branches, each referred to as a "physical science", together called the "physical sciences". Definition Phy ...

included device physics, materials science,

optical Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultravio ...

and

quantum electronics Quantum optics is a branch of atomic, molecular, and optical physics dealing with how individual quanta of light, known as photons, interact with atoms and molecules. It includes the study of the particle-like properties of photons. Photons have ...

, circuits and implementations of neural, optical, and other novel

computer architectures In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the ...

. Research areas in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

included

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different f ...

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consist ...

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

and cognitive science. During the past two decades, its focus has adapted in favor of computer science disciplines.

Research Areas

Research emphasis at NEC Labs America has evolved over time and in the current era, reflects a focus on

and its potential applications. Current research areas at NEC Labs America include the following: *

Data Science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a br ...

and

System Security Computer security, cybersecurity (cyber security), or information technology security (IT security) is the protection of computer systems and networks from attack by malicious actors that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, the ...

* Integrated Systems *

Machine Learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

* Media Analytics *

Optical Networking Optical networking is a means of communication that uses signals encoded in light to transmit information in various types of telecommunications networks. These include limited range Local area network, local-area networks (LAN) or Wide area networ ...

and Sensing

Key People

Presidents

The current president of NEC Labs America is Christopher White, who assumed the position in March 2020. The founding president of NEC Research Institute was

Dawon Kahng Dawon Kahng ( ko, 강대원; May 4, 1931 – May 13, 1992) was a Korean-American electrical engineer and inventor, known for his work in solid-state electronics. He is best known for inventing the MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effe ...

, who served from the inception of the organization until his death in May 1992 and was succeeded by C. William Gear (1992 – 2000) and David Waltz (2000 – 2002). Previous presidents of NEC Labs America in its current form include Robert Millstein (2002 – 2005), Roger Tran (2005 – 2017) and Akihiro Uchida (2017 – 2020).

Fellows

: A computer scientist and expert on graph algorithms, winner of the 1986 ACM Turing Award, currently distinguished professor at Princeton University and chief scientist at Intertrust Technologies. *

: A theoretical computer scientist, winner of the 1986 Nevanlinna Prize, the 1997 Knuth Prize and the 2010 ACM Turing Award, currently professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Harvard University.
Joe Giordmaine
The first VP of Physical Sciences, who previously managed the Bell Labs group that originated the field of fiber optics and whose graduate research developed maser amplifiers in pursuit of microwave spectroscopy with Charlie Townes (Nobel Prize 1964).
Stuart Solin
A Fellow at NEC who worked on magnetoresistive materials in pursuit of higher density recording structures and subsequently became a professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis. *

: A pioneer in semiconductor research, who subsequently led the industry forum at the physics department of

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

. *

: An expert in numerical analysis, who was previously the head of the computer science department at the

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the Flagship#Colleges and universities in ...

and led NECI during 1992- 2000. * David Waltz: The first VP of Computer Sciences, who was an expert in computer vision and AI, subsequently joining

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

where he was the director of Center for Computational Learning Systems. *

Boris Altshuler Boris Leonidovich Altshuler (russian: Бори́с Леонидович Альтшу́лер, born 27 January 1955, Leningrad, USSR) is a professor of theoretical physics at Columbia University. His specialty is theoretical condensed matter physic ...

: A leading researcher in condensed matter physics, who is currently a professor of theoretical physics at Columbia University, a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

and a Dirac Medal winner. * Ingemar Cox: Founder of the computer vision group who pioneered techniques in digital watermarking and commercialized them as CTO of the NEC spin-off Signify, currently a professor of computer science at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

Major Achievements

* CiteSeer: A digital library and search engine that indexes citations for scientific articles, allows ranking them by citation impact and supports queries by document attributes and citation details. It was created in 1997 by NEC Labs America researchers

Lee Giles Clyde Lee Giles is an American computer scientist and the David Reese Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. He is also Graduate Faculty Professor of Computer Science and Engineering ...

, Kurt Bollacker and

Steve Lawrence Steve Lawrence (born Sidney Liebowitz; July 8, 1935) is an American singer, comedian and actor, best known as a member of a duo with his wife Eydie Gormé, billed as " Steve and Eydie", and for his performance as Maury Sline, the manager and f ...

. * Fiber optic communication and sensing world records: NEC Labs America has established various world records in fiber optic communication and sensing. In 2011, a research team led by Dayou Qian and Ting Wang at NEC Labs America demonstrated the transmission of data at 101 Tbit/s through a single fiber optic core, which at the time was the world record for single fiber optic core data bandwidth. In 2013, NEC Labs America and

Corning Inc. Corning Incorporated is an American multinational technology company that specializes in specialty glass, ceramics, and related materials and technologies including advanced optics, primarily for industrial and scientific applications. The c ...

demonstrated the transmission of data at 1.05 Pbit/s over a multi-core fiber optic, which at the time was a record for single fiber optic bandwidth. In 2019, NEC Labs America teamed with

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas ...

to demonstrated the ability to use fiber optic communication and sensing over existing fiber optic telecommunication infrastructure. *

Torch A torch is a stick with combustible material at one end, which is ignited and used as a light source. Torches have been used throughout history, and are still used in processions, symbolic and religious events, and in juggling entertainment. I ...

: A machine learning library based on the Lua programming language that found widespread usage in deep learning. Created by NEC Labs America researcher Ronan Collobert and colleagues, it saw active development until 2018 and formed the basis for the popular

PyTorch PyTorch is a machine learning framework based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, originally developed by Meta AI and now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella. It is free and open ...

library. * ePathologist: Machine learning system developed at NEC Labs America to detect tissue and cell features within these images in order to identify regions of interest and make quantitative measurements of structures, to assist pathologists in making decisions relating to the clinical treatment of cancer in individual patients. In 2011, NEC and Royal Philips Electronics signed an agreement to jointly develop and market the technology.

References

External links

NEC Laboratories America, Inc.

NEC Corporation of America

NEC
{{NEC Corporation Computer science research organizations Research and development organizations NEC Corporation