Can AI explain who caused a crash? The CAViAR benchmark from NEC Laboratories America tests vision-language models on 2,249 real dashcam accident videos and finds that models read lighting and weather cues but struggle to identify the at-fault driver and the traffic rule that was broken.
Christopher White, President of NEC Laboratories America, will deliver a Day 1 plenary keynote at the 2026 MIT Research and Development Conference on November 17. His talk examines how AI may make deep industrial R&D essential once again for turning scientific advances into real impact.
NEC Laboratories America celebrates 24 years of research innovation at our Princeton, NJ and San Jose, CA locations. This year brought an expanded global R&D role for President Christopher White, two new optical departments, a 2026 Edison Patent Award, and breakthroughs in fiber sensing, satellite networks, and trustworthy AI.
Dr. Yue Tian leads the new Optical Sensing and Solutions department at NEC Laboratories America. Learn about his background, the department’s likely research agenda in fiber sensing, AI analytics, and grid monitoring, plus the infrastructure trends driving demand for this work.
NEC Laboratories America groups satellites that travel together into mobile orbital domains, cutting routing tables by 96.81%, doubling route computation speed, and reducing load at bottleneck gateways by 22% across a 3,000-satellite Starlink simulation.
Our exciting internship opportunities for Summer 2027 are now available. We are looking for students pursuing advanced degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Internships are typically 3 months long in duration. The benefits of working for us include the opportunity to quickly become part of a project team applying cutting-edge technology to industry-leading concepts.
NEC Laboratories America researchers introduce RILKE, a method that updates what a large language model knows without retraining. After 1,000 sequential edits, it kept near-perfect accuracy on edited facts and preserved general reasoning, while competing methods collapsed.
Haifeng Chen, Head of Data Science and System Security at NEC Laboratories America, delivers the opening keynote on trustworthy agents through monitoring and guardrails at the Rocky Mountain Workshop on Trustworthy and Responsible AI, November 4 and 5, 2026, at CU Boulder.
Dr. Yue-Kai Huang leads the new Optical Communications and Computing department at NEC Laboratories America. Learn about his background, the department’s likely research agenda in coherent transmission, self-managing networks, and photonic computing, plus the industry trends driving it.
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.