Today, as we mark our 24th anniversary, we celebrate a journey of bold ideas, disruptive innovation, world-class breakthroughs, and enduring impact across artificial intelligence, optics, networking, sensing, and system architecture. For more than two decades, we have grown into the U.S.-based center for NEC’s global research network, combining deep research with real-world, deployable solutions.

Leadership Spotlight

At the heart of our mission is our president, Dr. Christopher White, who continues to guide the organization toward impactful, market-driven innovation. In September 2026, Chris was appointed Corporate Senior Vice President and Global Managing Director, R&D at NEC Corporation. In this expanded role, he leads NEC’s worldwide R&D strategy while continuing to serve as President of NEC Laboratories America. His vision emphasizes bridging the gap between exploratory research and commercial transformation, ensuring that our discoveries lead to real-world benefits.

“At NEC Laboratories America, our mission is to generate significant new knowledge and create innovative solutions that remove critical barriers and open new markets.” – Christopher White, President, NEC Laboratories America

Innovation and Research Breakthroughs

Our success is built on the brilliance and creativity of our researchers. In September, we formed two new optical departments from our Optical Networking and Sensing group: Optical Communications and Computing, led by Yue-Kai Huang, and Optical Sensing and Solutions, led by Yue Tian. Our research now spans six core departments: Data Science and System Security, Integrated Systems, Machine Learning, Media Analytics, Optical Communications and Computing, and Optical Sensing and Solutions. Our teams are exploring:

• Trusted large language, multimodal, and agentic AI systems
• Advanced optical communications, photonic computing, and distributed fiber sensing for smart infrastructure
• New architectures for secure, data-driven computing

Legacy of Innovation

Our researchers continue to advance the frontiers of science while translating them into practical technologies and services. Some of our most significant milestones include:

• Optical Communications: Record-breaking fiber-optic bandwidth, including 101 Tbit/s transmission through a single-core fiber in 2011 and 1.05 Pbit/s transmission over multi-core fiber in 2013.
• Machine Learning: Early contributions to deep learning frameworks that helped pave the way for the PyTorch ecosystem.
• Intellectual Property: Hundreds of patents across AI, networking, and sensing, including recent filings in self-supervised multimodal learning and multimodal semantic analysis for image retrieval.

Highlights from the Past Year

• Edison Patent Award: Our researchers received a 2026 Edison Patent Award from the Research and Development Council of New Jersey for a bidirectional fiber design that lets a single optical fiber carry data traffic and structural sensing signals at the same time. The architecture was validated in a field trial across 55 kilometers of installed fiber.
• City-Wide Fiber Sensing: Working with Verizon, we turned live telecom fiber into a city-wide sensing network that detects vibrations along cable routes.
• Smarter Satellite Networks: Our mobile orbital domains approach groups satellites that travel together, cutting routing tables by 96.81% and doubling route computation speed in a 3,000-satellite simulation.
• Reliable AI Knowledge Updates: Our RILKE method updates the facts a large language model knows without retraining, maintaining accuracy through 1,000 sequential edits.
• AI for Science and Space: We shared how our System Invariant Analysis Technology contributed to NASA’s Artemis missions, and introduced MolDiffdAE for precise, multi-objective tuning of 3D molecular properties.
• Physical and Driving Scene AI: New work including PhyCo, HorizonForge, and HorizonWeaver brings physical realism and fine-grained control to video generation and autonomous driving simulation.
• Global Research Presence: Our researchers presented at OFC, CLEO, CVPR, OECC, ACL, ICML, and ECOC, among many other conferences, and welcomed a new class of summer interns in Princeton and San Jose.

Our organization has been home to influential scientists, including Turing Award laureates Leslie Valiant and Robert Tarjan, as well as many alums who now hold leading positions in academia and industry. Our culture of inquiry, collaboration, and applied impact continues to attract exceptional minds worldwide.

Our Research Mission

• Bridging Basic Research and Real-World Impact: Every project aligns scientific discovery with societal and industrial needs.
• Global Leadership in Intellectual Property: NEC and NEC Laboratories America collectively rank among the world’s top patent holders in biometrics, AI, and communications.
• Collaboration Across Sectors: NEC Laboratories America partners with universities, startups, and industry to accelerate the transition from idea to implementation.

Looking Forward

On this anniversary, we salute the scientists, engineers, interns, partners, and alumni whose work defines NEC Laboratories America. Their research continues to build the foundations for the technologies that power our connected world, from AI and 6G to intelligent sensing and cybersecurity. With new leadership responsibilities across NEC’s global research network and two new optical departments, we are poised to lead the next generation of technological evolution.