NEC Labs America

06/18/2026

The AUTOPILOT Workshop at brought together some of the brightest minds in autonomous driving for a full-day event in Denver. Now in its third edition, it proved once again why it has become one of the most anticipated gatherings in the community.

Attendees were treated to four outstanding keynotes from top industry leaders, including Jose M. Alvarez of NVIDIA, Bat El Shlomo of ZOOX, and Matthew Alun Brown of Wayve. NEC Labs America shone brightly, with Manmohan Chandraker delivering a standout keynote and Ali K. AlShami serving as a lead organizer, helping bring the entire event to life.

The technical program was equally impressive, with seven archival papers published in the official CVPR 2026 proceedings and 21 additional non-archival papers covering everything from vision-language models to real-time collision anticipation. Kaggle competition winners from institutions across three continents took the stage to share their approaches, making for some of the most engaging presentations of the day.

From open-world hazard detection to on-vehicle deployment of foundation models, AUTOPILOT 2026 tackled the hardest problems in with rigor and creativity. A landmark moment for the field, and thanks to everyone who attended and presented. See you next year for our 4th edition!

Check out our event photos! https://www.nec-labs.com/blog/nec-labs-america-attends-cvpr-2026-in-denver-co-june-3-7-2026/

06/08/2026

This week, six elite squads of NEC Labs America summer were activated for Intern Operation: Cipher and Seek, a grueling yet fun field exercise engineered by mission commanders Stacey and Wendy. First, each squad had to crack an ancient cipher using nothing but their minds and two decoder boards. The team that broke the code first earned a 30-second tactical advantage heading into the main mission: a high-stakes sweep of the Princeton facility to locate emergency equipment, document critical infrastructure, and identify key personnel. One team took home the prize, but all squads completed the mission and walked away knowing that they are ready.

06/05/2026

What if you could search imagery the same way you search the web?

🛰️ Our new Open-SAT system lets users query high-resolution satellite images in plain English, no predefined categories, no model retraining required. Ask for “solar panels” or “construction sites,” and the system finds them, accurately and fast.

The secret: instead of tuning a similarity threshold, uses an LLM to reason about what surrounds an object of interest in a satellite scene, then refines the search embedding using that context. The result is a classification-style retrieval that is both threshold-free and training-free.

The authors of the paper are Md Adnan Arefeen, 2023 and 2024 NEC Labs America Intern, North South University; Biplob Debnath, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Ravi K. Rajendran, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Murugan Sankaradas, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Srimat T. Chakradhar, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.

Read more: https://nec-labs.com/blog/open-sat-llm-guided-query-embedding-refinement-for-open-vocabulary-object-retrieval-in-satellite-imagery/

06/02/2026

The NEC Laboratories America team has touched down in Denver for this week, running June 3-7. The / Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition is one of the most prestigious gatherings in AI and computer vision, bringing together researchers, engineers, and innovators from around the world to share the latest advances in computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition.

Year after year, it's where the field takes its next step forward. This year, our team is showing up in full force, organizing workshops, presenting posters, and delivering virtual presentations. Here is our agenda.

• AUTOPILOT Workshop (June 3): Ali K. AlShami on the organizing committee for this workshop on safety-critical autonomous driving, bringing together academia and industry to explore robust perception, prediction, decision-making, and motion planning.
• Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Large Language Models: Jingchen Sun (Intern), Shaobo Han and Deep Patel will present a poster on Beta-KD. The key question: can uncertainty tell a multimodal LLM when to trust the teacher versus the data? We formulate knowledge distillation as Bayesian inference with uncertainty-aware weighting.
• Object-Aware 4D Human Motion Generation (June 4): Deep Patel presents virtually on generating realistic, object-aware human motion across space and time.
• Anomaly Detection with Foundation Models Workshop (June 4): Abhishek Aich is organizing the ADFM Workshop, focused on anomaly detection, foundation models, trustworthy AI, and computer vision.
• LangDriveCTRL: Natural Language Controllable Driving Scene Editing with Multi-modal Agents (June 4): Yun He (intern) and Zaid Tasneem present LangDriveCTRL, a natural-language-controllable framework for editing real-world driving videos to synthesize diverse traffic scenarios.
• HorizonWeaver: Generalizable Multi-Level Semantic Editing for Driving Scenes (June 5): Mauricio Soroco (intern) and Ziyu Jiang present HorizonWeaver, which tackles three fundamental challenges in driving scene editing.
• HorizonForge: Driving Scene Editing with Any Trajectories and Any Vehicles (June 6): Yifan Wang (intern) and Ziyu Jiang present HorizonForge, a unified framework that reconstructs scenes as editable Gaussian Splats and Meshes, enabling fine-grained 3D manipulation and language-driven vehicle insertion.

Read more on our blog: https://nec-labs.com/blog/nec-labs-
america-attends-cvpr-2026-in-denver-co-june-3-7-2026/

See you in Denver!

06/01/2026

Our Optical Networking and Sensing team knows that when you split light, you reveal a full spectrum of color, each wavelength distinct, each one essential. The same is true of the people who make up our community. Every identity, background, and perspective adds something irreplaceable to what we build together. Innovation thrives, and our team is stronger when every voice is welcome.

This June and every day, we celebrate the + members of our research community and recommit to a workplace where diversity of identity and thought drives the innovative breakthroughs of tomorrow.

05/26/2026

Last month, NEC Corporation held its 2026 New Employee Training, the "OneNEC Program," bringing together approximately 1,900 new colleagues from 24 group companies. Across different companies and backgrounds, participants connected as OneNEC, explored their shared purpose, and reflected on the challenges ahead.

✅"You can't do it without a team."
✅"What matters is trust."

In the second half of the program, wheelchair tennis legend Kunieda Shingo joined as a special guest for a talk session with CHRO Shiori Nagata on the theme of "Mindset for Challenging the Future." Challenges aren't reserved for exceptional people. They're built from everyday choices. Find what drives you, be honest with yourself, and create value together. Participants left with thoughts they'd shaped in their own words and a clearer sense of what comes next.

✅ "Because I have friends, I want to take that first step myself."
✅"To become someone others can rely on, I want to show up fully for the work in front of me."

Every individual is facing their own future and taking their first steps as part of the NEC Group. Challenges begin with people. The future starts moving from here.

👉 See highlights from the day! https://web.nec-careers.com/digup/article/7135/

05/25/2026

This Memorial Day, we pause to honor the individuals who gave everything in service to this country. Their courage, sacrifice, and dedication made possible the freedoms we enjoy every day, including the liberty to pursue education, knowledge, and innovation. To all who have served, and to the families who carry their memory forward: thank you. Wishing everyone a meaningful and reflective Memorial Day.

05/22/2026

We're proud to share that Dr. Sarper Özharar, Senior Researcher, was recently featured in Frontier, Koç University's research and science newsletter!

In the interview, Sarper reflects on how his interdisciplinary training has shaped his approach to complex, real-world problems. He credits his ability to think across disciplines while staying grounded in fundamental theory as a defining strength in his research career.

Sarper also received the Achievement in Science and Technology Award from the Koç University Alumni Award Program in 2023, in recognition of the meaningful impact he has made in his field since graduating with a degree in Physics in 2002.

We're fortunate to have researchers like Sarper on our team, bringing curiosity, depth, and a collaborative spirit to the work we do every day.

✅ Read the full interview: https://research.ku.edu.tr/frontier/frontier-issue-1-2026-koc-universitys-newsletter-for-research-and-science/ #:~:text=The%20Making%20of%20a%20Research%20Mindset

✅Sarper Özharar bio: https://www.nec-labs.com/research/optical-networking-sensing/people/sarper-ozharar/

05/14/2026

NEC Corporation, in collaboration with the Ishikawa Group at Tokyo University of Science, has developed a technology that enables continuous, pinpoint laser irradiation of fast-moving targets from multiple locations. High-speed cameras and laser control modules installed at each location independently detect and track the target. This allows the laser to remain stably focused on a single point even under high-speed, complex motion or in environments with obstructions.

Key features of this technology include:

1️⃣ Stable tracking of fast and complex motion: Leveraging proprietary high-speed cameras, image processing, and control technologies, the system continuously directs the laser to the target point—even when movements are highly unpredictable.
2️⃣ Multi-point irradiation for enhanced safety and robustness: By combining laser irradiation from multiple locations, high output is achieved only at the intended target point while maintaining safety in the surrounding area. Even if one laser path is obstructed, irradiation from other locations continues, ensuring robust and reliable operation.
3️⃣ Modular design for easy installation and scalability: The independently operating modules require no precise alignment, enabling flexible installation, reconfiguration, and easy expansion to suit various applications.

This technology is expected to be applied across a wide range of industrial fields, including pest control, removal of airborne or underwater debris, foreign-object elimination, and precision processing on high-speed manufacturing lines, among others. It offers a new solution for environments requiring precise laser irradiation of fast-moving objects.

In the video below, you can see three lasers smoothly tracking fast-moving objects, such as a yo-yo 🪀 and a ping-pong ball, in real time.

8 likes, 2 comments. "High-speed Multi-Laser Aiming at Unpredictable Dynamic Targets"

05/14/2026

New research from NEC Laboratories America and Arizona State University tackles one of retrieval-augmented generation’s biggest blind spots. "Learning to Route" introduces a rule-driven agent framework that decides whether to query a document corpus or a relational database and gets smarter over time.

Experiments on three QA datasets demonstrate that the framework consistently outperforms static strategies and learned routing baselines, achieving higher accuracy while maintaining moderate computational cost.

Authors: Haoyue Bai and Yanjie Fu, from Arizona State University and Haoyu Wang, Shengyu Chen, Zhengzhang Chen, Lu-An Tang, Wei Cheng and Haifeng Chen, from NEC Laboratories America.

Learn more: https://www.nec-labs.com/blog/how-rule-driven-routing-makes-retrieval-augmented-generation-smarter/

We introduce a rule-driven retrieval-augmented generation framework that routes queries between documents and databases for better, faster answers.