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NEC Labs America Presents at ECOC 2026 in Málaga, Spain, September 20-24th

September 7, 2026||inEvents|tagsECOC, ai infrastructure, andrea d'amico, distributed acoustic sensing, earthquake monitoring, ecoc 2026, event localization, ezra ip, fatih yaman, fiber optic sensing, jian fang, ming fang huang, optical communications, optical communications computing, optical networking, optical sensing, optical sensing solutions, philip n ji, photonics, sarper ozharar, submarine cables, wataru kohno, yue tian

The team from NEC Laboratories America is heading to ECOC, the European Conference on Optical Communications in Málaga, Spain. Widely regarded as Europe’s largest optical communications event, ECOC ranks second worldwide in scale. Industry researchers, academic researchers, and professionals will gather here to exchange ideas on advances shaping the field and explore trends that drive scientific progress and economic growth.

ECOC 2026

The program spans every corner of optical communications and networking as the conference spotlights photonics’ role in tackling pressing challenges facing the information society, with emerging applications in Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things pushing the field forward. Our researchers will be presenting papers and posters at sessions and workshops throughout the week.

Presentations

Detection, Localization and Tracking of Underwater Acoustic Sources via A Passive Fiber Optic Hydrophone Array

Sarper Ozharar NEC Labs America
  • Abstract: A fiber-optic hydrophone array comprising four passive fiber mandrels, interrogated by a distributed acoustic sensing system, was deployed in a lake for field testing. Several stationary and moving underwater acoustic sources were localized and continuously tracked, and their acoustic signals were enhanced using beamforming techniques.

Power-Efficient Multi-Petabit/s Submarine Cables

Fatih Yaman NEC Labs America
  • Workshop: “How can we overcome the power wall across optical communication systems – from AI clusters to submarine networks?”
  • Workshop Abstract: this session shares emerging objectives driven by the power limitations of future optical communication systems, from AI clusters to submarine networks, and discusses potential technological breakthroughs.

Sensing Earthquakes, Ships and Other Things Using Submarine Cables

Ezra Ip NEC Labs America
  • Workshop: Telecom Fiber as a Geophysical Sensor for Earthquake, Tsunami and Microseismic Monitoring.
  • Workshop Abstract: telecom fiber networks are emerging as large-scale sensors enabling detection of earthquakes, deep-ocean tsunamis, and microseismic activity; the session examines the suitability of distributed acoustic and polarization-based sensing for early warning, event localization, and industrial monitoring.

Advancing Forward-Transmission Fibre Sensing for Precise Event Localisation

Jian Fang NEC Labs America
  • Session: Integrated Sensing and Communication
  • Abstract: We review recent progress in forward-transmission fibre sensing from a practical perspective, revisit the fundamental challenges in the localisation performance, and discuss possible approaches to improve event localisation accuracy.

Expanding and Benchmarking Optical Networks for and with AI

Andrea D’Amico

Passive Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Borehole Seismic Velocity Profiling: A 3 km Geothermal Field Trial

Philip Ji NEC Labs America
  • Session Abstract: We demonstrate passive borehole velocity profiling using coherent DAS on a 3 km geothermal well. Deconvolution interferometry with phase-weighted stacking recovers velocities from ambient micro-vibrations without active sources, achieving <80 m/s mean absolute error at 0.5–1 km depth against a calibration shot ground truth.

Over-80-km Transmission of Image-Derived Semantic Data via a Distributed Fiber-Optic Acoustic Sensing Link

Wataru Kohno NEC Labs America
  • Abstract: We demonstrate underwater acoustic transmission of image-derived semantic messages using an over-80-km distributed fiber-optic acoustic sensing link with chirp-coded pulse interrogation, Raman amplification, and fiber-optic hydrophones. At 50~bps with Raman amplification, 100 scene-graph messages (21,193bits) are delivered without observed errors (BER upper bound $4.72\times10^{-5}$.

TPC member and Session Chair

Ming-Fang Huang NEC Labs America

Session Chair

  • Th2-B – SoP sensing and applications. Ming-Fang Huang (Chair) and Steinar Bjørnstad (Chair, Tampnet AS) SC 08: Sensing and microwave photonics. Thursday, September 24 from 11:00 – 12:30. Auditorium 2.
  • We3-G – Subsea fiber sensing and advanced interrogation techniques. Steinar Bjørnstad (Chair, Tampnet AS) and Ming-Fang Huang (Chair). SC 08: Sensing and microwave photonics. Wednesday, September 23 from 14:00 – 15:30. Conference Room 2.2.

Collaboration

Yue Tian NEC Labs America
  • Yue Tian, Department Head, Optical Sensing & Solutions Department.
  • Attending ECOC for collaboration opportunities.
  • Dr. Tian leads the OSS team at NEC Labs America, spanning distributed fiber-optic sensing, optical gas sensing, fiber communications, and photonic neural networks research. His work focuses on optical signal and data processing for applications including ultra-long-haul transmission, intelligent sensing for smart cities, ICT and power infrastructure monitoring, and undersea sensing. He has contributed to developing next-generation multimodal sensing networks that integrate large-scale infrastructure monitoring with advanced data analytics.

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