Christopher White has been named Corporate Senior Vice President at NEC Corporation and Managing Director of its global Research & Development Division, leading worldwide research strategy while continuing as President of NEC Laboratories America. This article, Message from the head of R&D, was originally published on the NEC Research & Development website and can be read in its entirety there.
Christopher White has been appointed Corporate Senior Vice President at NEC Corporation and Managing Director of the Research & Development Division (globally). In this expanded role, Chris will lead NEC’s worldwide R&D strategy while continuing to serve as President of NEC Laboratories America, Inc.
NEC Laboratories America teams stepped away from the lab this summer for volleyball in San Jose, kayaking in Princeton, Topgolf, an intern hike at Villa Montalvo, a potluck lunch, and karaoke night. Colleagues across departments and locations connected over friendly competition, good food, and fresh air.
NEC Laboratories America is bringing a strong research presence to ECOC 2026, the European Conference on Optical Communications in Málaga, Spain. Researchers from the Optical Communications & Computing and Optical Sensing & Solutions departments will present papers, posters, and workshop talks covering underwater acoustic sensing, power-efficient submarine cable design, earthquake and tsunami monitoring through telecom fiber, and forward-transmission fiber sensing.
NEC Laboratories America has formed two new departments from its Optical Networking and Sensing group. Optical Communications and Computing, led by Yue-Kai Huang, and Optical Sensing and Solutions, led by Yue Tian, will carry the lab’s photonics research into new territory.
Giuseppe Coviello of NEC Laboratories America presents “Völ: A Domain-Specific Language and Runtime for AI-Native Workflows” at HiPES 2026, held alongside Euro-Par in Pisa, Italy on August 25th. Völ lets developers describe AI workflows declaratively, leaving execution to the runtime.
NEC Laboratories America will receive a 2026 Edison Patent Award for a patent that lets optical fiber carry both data communications and distributed sensing at once, reducing interference through counter-propagation and standard WDM filtering, validated across long distances of field fiber.
Learn about the amazing group of interns who joined us at Princeton and San Jose campuses this summer. Their hard work, fresh perspectives, and dedication have truly made an impact across the board, from cutting-edge research projects to innovative software development initiatives.
Our HorizonWeaver software edits driving scenes with instruction-guided AI, adding traffic, changing weather, and generalizing to unseen roads, all while preserving the safety-critical details that keep autonomous vehicle testing honest.
Multimodal retrievers are essential for knowledge-based visual question answering, where they retrieve external evidence for image-question pairs. However, existing contrastive training methods typically treat all unmatched query-document pairs as equally informative negatives, which is problematic because many unmatched documents may still be semantically relevant or partially useful. We propose Bayesian Data Reweighting, a probabilistic framework that models query-document importance as latent variables and adaptively infers posterior weights to downweight likely false negatives. With closed-form posterior updates under conjugate priors and stochastic EM optimization, our method consistently improves retrieval accuracy across three retrievers and seven knowledge-based VQA benchmarks.