NEC Labs America Joins CS3 Advisory Board to Advance Smart Streetscapes

May 19, 2025||inNews|tagsCS3, center for smart streetscapes, chris white, chris white media, computer vision, kay seo, manmohan chandraker, national science foundation, smart streetscapes

NEC Laboratories America is proud to announce our new role as a member of the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) Advisory Board, a multidisciplinary initiative focused on transforming urban streets through technology, data, and design.

Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) Logo

The CS3 initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation as part of its Smart and Connected Communities program, brings together researchers, cities, and companies to tackle real-world challenges in urban environments. The focus is on deploying intelligent infrastructure that can enhance safety, efficiency, and accessibility in public spaces.

CS3 is the largest federally funded engineering research center focused on purpose-built technology solutions for the streetscape. The Center was established in 2022 through a $26 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to its core partners: Columbia University, Florida Atlantic University, Rutgers University, University of Central Florida, and Lehman College. CS3 collaborates with industry, government, and community stakeholders to foster the development of a rich ecosystem of streetscape applications that can help address the challenges faced by communities.

As the U.S.-based hub for NEC Corporation’s global research network, NEC Labs America contributes cutting-edge work in AI, computer vision, and edge computing. These technologies are essential for building responsive systems that can, for example, detect hazards in real time, analyze traffic patterns, or deliver localized services based on community needs. Our participation in CS3 is led by:

Christopher White Square

Dr. Christopher White, President of NEC Labs America

Kay Seo NEC Labs America

Kay Seo, Senior Director and Head of Strategic Pursuits and Global Partnerships

Manmohan Chandraker NEC Labs America

Manmohan Chandraker, Head of the Media Analytics Department and Head of Computer Vision Research.

Chris spoke on the role of research in innovation and going to market in a keynote address at the CS3 VALIDATE Accelerator Demo Day in April. He reflected on how industrial research bridges the gap between groundbreaking innovation and real-world application. He described NEC’s broad technology portfolio, from optical networking and sensing to machine learning and media analytics.

Together, we’re looking forward to collaborating with academic partners, civic leaders, and industry experts to explore the intersection of technology and the public realm. By aligning innovative research with community impact, we hope to accelerate the deployment of intelligent, people-centered streetscapes.

To learn more about CS3 and NEC Labs America’s involvement, please visit the CS3 Partners with NEC Laboratories America on Research and Welcomes Them to the Advisory Board announcement.

Smart Streetscape

Read Our News Posts

How AI Can Transform the Way Companies Buy What They Need

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.
Read more
Open SAT How We Taught AI to Search Satellite Images Like a Search Engine

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.
Read more
Training Small AI Models Without Blindly Trusting Big Teacher 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.
Read more
How Rule-Driven Routing Makes Retrieval-Augmented Generation Smarter

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.
Read more
Making Video AI Fast Enough for the Real World

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.
Read more
How Our AI Contributed to NASA's Artemis Missions Blog Post

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.
Read more