Teaching AI to Edit Driving Scenes It Has Never Seen with HorizonWeaver

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.

Turning Every Telecom Cable into a City-Wide Sensor Network

Verizon and NEC Laboratories America turned live telecom fiber into a city-wide sensing network. By repurposing existing optical infrastructure, the system detects vibrations along fiber routes, cutting cable damage incidents and improving response times. The approach also enables AI models that adapt to new, unseen routes without manual labeling.

When Video AI Gets Physics Wrong, the Consequences Are Real

Video generation models can look physically convincing while getting the physics completely wrong. PhyCo, new research from our Media Analytics department, introduces continuous, controllable physical properties to video AI, allowing practitioners to specify friction, bounce, and force.

Mix-CLAP: Teaching Audio AI to Work in the Noisy Real World

Mix-CLAP from NEC Laboratories America delivers near-Transformer accuracy for sound event classification at a fraction of the compute cost, using dual lightweight encoders and adaptive, noise-aware inference for real-world edge deployment.

How AI Can Transform the Way Companies Buy What They Need

Procurement teams lose time and money to inaccurate demand forecasts and manual supplier negotiations. A new framework from NEC Corporation and NEC Laboratories America combines automated negotiation with multimodal AI forecasting to optimize both sides of the procurement process.

Open SAT: How We Taught AI to Search Satellite Images Like a Search Engine

Satellite imagery is vast, high-resolution, and rich with information, but finding specific objects within it using natural language has remained a stubborn challenge. Open-SAT, developed by researchers at NEC Laboratories America and North South University, tackles this problem without retraining any models.

Training Small AI Models Without Blindly Trusting Big Teacher Models

Machine learning is shifting from learning from data alone to learning from both data and teacher models. Beta-KD uses uncertainty-aware Bayesian weighting to train compact multimodal AI without blindly trusting every teacher signal.

How Rule-Driven Routing Makes Retrieval-Augmented Generation Smarter

Most retrieval-augmented generation systems stop at documents, ignoring the relational databases that power finance, healthcare, and research. Our researchers built a rule-driven framework that learns which source to query for each question, delivering better answers at lower computational cost.

Making Video AI Fast Enough for the Real World

State-of-the-art video models are accurate but too slow for live deployment. This work transfers their knowledge into causal streaming models that process video frames in real time, achieving 4x lower latency with competitive accuracy across action detection and pedestrian intent tasks.

How Our AI Contributed to NASA’s Artemis Missions

NEC Laboratories America’s AI research played a role in NASA’s Artemis missions, helping analyze complex spacecraft data at scale. Our System Invariant Analysis Technology enables faster insights, improved anomaly detection, and greater confidence in mission readiness for deep space exploration.