NEC Laboratories America

Integrated Systems | Srimat T. Chakradhar

Srimat T. Chakradhar

Srimat T. Chakradhar

Department Head

Integrated Systems

Linkedin Logo

Giuseppe Coviello Presents at HiPES 2026 | Euro-Par in Pisa, Italy on August 25th

Giuseppe Coviello of NEC Laboratories America presents “Völ: A Domain-Specific Language and Runtime for AI-Native Workflows” at HiPES 2026, held alongside Euro-Par in Pisa, Italy on August 25th. Völ lets developers describe AI workflows declaratively, leaving execution to the runtime.

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

Open-SAT: LLM-Guided Query Embedding Refinement for Open-Vocabulary Object Retrieval in Satellite Imagery

In satellite applications, user queries often take the form of open-ended natural language, extending beyond a fixed set of predefined categories. This open-vocabulary nature poses significant challenges for retrieving relevant image tiles, as the retrieval system must generalize to a wide range of unseen

RunAgent: Interpreting Natural-Language Plans with Constraint-Guided Execution (IEEE)

Humans solve problems by executing targeted plans, yet large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for structured workflow execution. We propose RunAgent, a multiagent plan execution platform that interprets natural-language plans while enforcing stepwise execution through constraints and rubrics.

Agentic Placement of Microservices on the Computing Continuum

Deploying microservices across the computing continuum (edge–cloud) requires placement decisions that adapt to workload variation and heterogeneous infrastructure, yet existing solutions often rely on static policies or opaque heuristics. We present Bellona a system for reliable and auditable Large

Visual Alignment of Medical Vision-Language Models for Grounded Radiology Report Generation

Radiology Report Generation (RRG) is a critical step toward automating healthcare workflows, facilitating accurate patient assessments, and reducing the workload of medical professionals. Despite recent progress in Large Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs), generating radiology reports that are

TacTool: Tactical Tool usage in Agentic AI Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming the centerpiece in the design and deployment of Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. AI agents typically have (a) reasoning ability to analyze and think through the given task, (b) context/memory to remember things in the short-term and long-term, and

SlideCraft: Context-aware Slides Generation Agent

Creating effective slide presentations requires adapting both content and structure to match the communication context e.g. whether the presentation is for summarizing to executives, or reporting progress to research supervisors. In research and enterprise environments, this need for context-sensitive

TalentScout: Multimodal AI-Driven Expert Finding in Organizations

Identifying subject-matter experts within organizations remains a challenging task due to the scale, heterogeneity, and unstructured nature of enterprise knowledge assets. We present TalentScout, an AI-driven expert identification system that constructs a unified, skill-centric knowledge graph by ingesting

Murugan Sankaradas presents TalentScout: Multimodal AI-Driven Expert Finding in Organizations at PICom2025 on October 21st

Murugan Sankaradas (presenting virtually) will present “TalentScout: Multimodal AI-Driven Expert Finding in Organizations” at the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing (PICom2025) on Tuesday, October 21 (10:30am–12pm JST) | Monday, October 20 (9:30–11pm ET) in

Kunal Rao presents SlideCraft: Context-Aware Slides Generation Agent at PICom 2025 on October 21st

Kunal Rao (presenting virtually) will present “SlideCraft: Context-Aware Slides Generation Agent” at the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing hashtag#PICom2025 on Tuesday, Oct 21 (10:30am–12pm JST) | Monday, Oct 20 (9:30–11pm ET) in Hokkaido, Japan. SlideCraft

Bifröst: Peer-to-peer Load-balancing for Function Execution in Agentic AI Systems

Agentic AI systems rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to execute complex tasks by invoking external functions. The efficiency of these systems depends on how well function execution is managed, especially under heterogeneous and high-variance workloads, where function execution times can range from

Roadside Multi-LiDAR Data Fusion for Enhanced Traffic Safety

Roadside LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors promise safer and faster traffic management and vehicular operations. However, occlusion and small view angles are significant challenges to widespread use of roadside LiDARs. We consider fusing data from multiple LiDARs at a traffic intersection to

EcoDoc: A Cost-Efficient Multimodal Document Processing System for Enterprises Using LLMs

Enterprises are increasingly adopting Generative AI applications to extract insights from large volumes of multimodal documents in domains such as finance, law, healthcare, and industry. These documents contain structured and unstructured data (images, charts, handwritten texts, etc.) requiring robust

XPF: Agentic AI System for Business Workflow Automation

In this paper, we propose a novel agentic AI system called XPF, which enables users to create “agents” using just natural language, where each agent is capable of executing complex, real-world business workflows in an accurate and reliable manner. XPF provides an interface to develop and iterate over

Re-ranking the Context for Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge to generate a response within a context with improved accuracy and reduced hallucinations. However, multi-modal RAG systems face unique challenges: (i) the retrieval process may select irrelevant

SimCache: Similarity Caching for Efficient VLM-based Scene Understanding

Scene understanding systems analyze visual contexts by detecting objects, their attributes, and the interactions among them to provide a holistic interpretation. Understanding a scene requires analyzing multiple salient regions within a single video frame. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have

Latency-driven Execution of LLM-generated Application Code on the Computing Continuum

Latency-critical applications demand quick responses. Ideally, detailed insights are preferable for the best decision making and response actions. However, in situations when detailed insights cannot be provided quickly, even basic information goes a long way in tackling the situation effectively. For

LLM-based Distributed Code Generation and Cost-Efficient Execution in the Cloud

The advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), is reshaping the software industry by automating code generation. Many LLM-driven distributed processing systems rely on serial code generation constrained by predefined libraries, limiting flexibility

Real-Time Network-Aware Roadside LiDAR Data Compression

LiDAR technology has emerged as a pivotal tool in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), providing unique capabilities that have significantly transformed roadside traffic applications. However, this transformation comes with a distinct challenge: the immense volume of data generated by LiDAR sensors.

CAMTUNER: Adaptive Video Analytics Pipelines via Real-time Automated Camera Parameter Tuning

In Video Analytics Pipelines (VAP), Analytics Units (AUs) such as object detection and face recognition operating on remote servers rely heavily on surveillance cameras to capture high-quality video streams to achieve high accuracy. Modern network cameras offer an array of parameters that directly influence

EdgeSync: Efficient Edge-Assisted Video Analytics via Network Contention-Aware Scheduling

With the advancement of 5G, edge-assisted video analytics has become increasingly popular, driven by the technology’s ability to support low-latency, high-bandwidth applications. However, in scenarios where multiple clients competing for network resources, network contention poses a significant challenge.

RAG-check: Evaluating Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation Performance

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models (LLMs) by using external knowledge to guide response generation, reducing hallucinations. However, RAG, particularly multi-modal RAG, can introduce new hallucination sources: (i) the retrieval process may select irrelevant pieces (e.g.,

DiCE-M: Distributed Code Generation and Execution for Marine Applications – An Edge-Cloud Approach

Edge computing has emerged as a transformative technology that reduces application latency, improves cost efficiency, enhances security, and enables large-scale deployment of applications across various domains. In environmental monitoring, systems such as MegaSense[49], use low-cost sensors to gather

DiCE: Distributed Code generation and Execution

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), specifically, Large Language Models (LLMs), have shown tremendous potential in automating several tasks and improving human productivity. Recent works have shown them to be quite useful in writing and summarizing text (articles, blogs, poems, stories, songs,

iRAG: Advancing RAG for Videos with an Incremental Approach

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems combine the strengths of language generation and information retrieval to power many real-world applications like chatbots. Use of RAG for understanding of videos is appealing but there are two critical limitations. One-time, upfront conversion of all content

TrafficLens: Multi-Camera Traffic Video Analysis Using LLMs

Traffic cameras are essential in urban areas, playing a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems. Multiple cameras at intersections enhance law enforcement capabilities, traffic management, and pedestrian safety. However, efficiently managing and analyzing multi-camera feeds poses challenges

Optimizing LLM API usage costs with novel query-aware reduction of relevant enterprise data

Costs of LLM API usage rise rapidly when proprietary enterprise data is used as context for user queries to generate more accurate responses from LLMs. To reduce costs, we propose LeanContext, which generates query-aware, compact and AI model-friendly summaries of relevant enterprise data context. This

ViTA: An Efficient Video-to-Text Algorithm using VLM for RAG-based Video Analysis System

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is used in natural language processing (NLP) to provide query-relevant information in enterprise documents to large language models (LLMs). Such enterprise context enables the LLMs to generate more informed and accurate responses. When enterprise data is primarily

Deep Video Codec Control for Vision Models

Standardized lossy video coding is at the core of almost all real-world video processing pipelines. Rate control is used to enable standard codecs to adapt to different network bandwidth conditions or storage constraints. However standard video codecs (e.g. H.264) and their rate control modules aim to

Deep Learning-Based Real-Time Quality Control of Standard Video Compression for Live Streaming

Ensuring high-quality video content for wireless users has become increasingly vital. Nevertheless, maintaining a consistent level of video quality faces challenges due to the fluctuating encoded bitrate, primarily caused by dynamic video content, especially in live streaming scenarios. Video compression

StreamingRAG: Real-time Contextual Retrieval and Generation Framework

Extracting real-time insights from multi-modal data streams from various domains such as healthcare, intelligent transportation, and satellite remote sensing remains a challenge. High computational demands and limited knowledge scope restrict the applicability of Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs)

ECO-LLM: LLM-based Edge Cloud Optimization

AI/ML techniques have been used to solve systems problems, but their applicability to customize solutions on-the-fly has been limited. Traditionally, any customization required manually changing the AI/ML model or modifying the code, configuration parameters, application settings, etc. This incurs too

LeanContext: Cost-efficient Domain-specific Question Answering Using LLMs

Question-answering (QA) is a significant application of Large Language Models (LLMs), shaping chatbot capabilities across healthcare, education, and customer service. However, widespread LLM integration presents a challenge for small businesses due to the high expenses of LLM API usage. Costs rise rapidly

Deep Learning-Based Real-Time Rate Control for Live Streaming on Wireless Networks

Providing wireless users with high-quality video content has become increasingly important. However, ensuring consistent video quality poses challenges due to variable encodedbitrate caused by dynamic video content and fluctuating channel bitrate caused by wireless fading effects. Suboptimal selection

CLAP: Cost and Latency-Aware Placement of Microservices on the Computing Continuum

For microservices-based real-time stream processing applications, computing at the edge delivers fast responses for low workloads, but as workload increases, the response time starts to slow down due to limited compute capacity. Abundant compute capacity in the cloud delivers fast responses even for

iRAG: An Incremental Retrieval Augmented Generation System for Videos

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems combine the strengths of language generation and information retrieval to power many real-world applications like chatbots. Use of RAG for combined understanding of multimodal data such as text, images and videos is appealing but two critical limitations exist:

LARA: Latency-Aware Resource Allocator for Stream Processing Applications

One of the key metrics of interest for stream processing applications is “latency”, which indicates the total time it takes for the application to process and generate insights from streaming input data. For mission-critical video analytics applications like surveillance and monitoring, it is of paramount

Differentiable JPEG: The Devil is in The Details

JPEG remains one of the most widespread lossy image coding methods. However, the non-differentiable nature of JPEG restricts the application in deep learning pipelines. Several differentiable approximations of JPEG have recently been proposed to address this issue. This paper conducts a comprehensive

Scale Up while Scaling Out Microservices in Video Analytics Pipelines

Modern video analytics applications comprise multiple microservices chained together as pipelines and executed on container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Kubernetes automatically handles the scaling of these microservices for efficient application execution. There are two popular choices for

Semantic Multi-Resolution Communications

Deep learning based joint source-channel coding (JSCC) has demonstrated significant advancements in data reconstruction compared to separate source-channel coding (SSCC). This superiority arises from the suboptimality of SSCC when dealing with finite block-length data. Moreover, SSCC falls short in reconstructing

Deep Video Codec Control

Deep Video Codec Control Lossy video compression is commonly used when transmitting and storing video data. Unified video codecs (e.g., H.264 or H.265) remain the emph(Unknown sysvar: (de facto)) standard, despite the availability of advanced (neural) compression approaches. Transmitting videos in the

Retrospective : A Dynamically Configurable Coprocessor For Convolutional Neural Networks

In 2008, parallel computing posed significant challenges due to the complexities of parallel programming and the bottlenecks associated with efficient parallel execution. Inspired by the remarkable scalability achieved by networking and storage systems in handling extensive packet traffic and persistent

Elixir: A System To Enhance Data Quality For Multiple Analytics On A Video Stream

IoT sensors, especially video cameras, are ubiquitously deployed around the world to perform a variety of computer vision tasks in several verticals including retail, health- care, safety and security, transportation, manufacturing, etc. To amortize their high deployment effort and cost, it is desirable

AnB: Application-In-A-Box To Rapidly Deploy and Self-Optimize 5G Apps

We present Application in a Box (AnB) product concept aimed at simplifying the deployment and operation of remote 5G applications. AnB comes pre-configured with all necessary hardware and software components, including sensors like cameras, hardware and software components for a local 5G wireless network,

FactionFormer: Context-Driven Collaborative Vision Transformer Models for Edge Intelligence

Edge Intelligence has received attention in the recent times for its potential towards improving responsiveness, reducing the cost of data transmission, enhancing security and privacy, and enabling autonomous decisions by edge devices. However, edge devices lack the power and compute resources necessary

StreetAware: A High-Resolution Synchronized Multimodal Urban Scene Dataset

Access to high-quality data is an important barrier in the digital analysis of urban settings, including applications within computer vision and urban design. Diverse forms of data collected from sensors in areas of high activity in the urban environment, particularly at street intersections, are valuable

Content-aware auto-scaling of stream processing applications on container orchestration platforms

Modern applications are designed as an interacting set of microservices, and these applications are typically deployed on container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Several attractive features in Kubernetes make it a popular choice for deploying applications, and automatic scaling is one such

DyCo: Dynamic, Contextualized AI Models

Devices with limited computing resources use smaller AI models to achieve low-latency inferencing. However, model accuracy is typically much lower than the accuracy of a bigger model that is trained and deployed in places where the computing resources are relatively abundant. We describe DyCo, a novel

APT: Adaptive Perceptual quality based camera Tuning using reinforcement learning

Cameras are increasingly being deployed in cities, enterprises and roads world-wide to enable many applications in public safety, intelligent transportation, retail, healthcare and manufacturing. Often, after initial deployment of the cameras, the environmental conditions and the scenes around these

DataX Allocator: Dynamic resource management for stream analytics at the Edge

Serverless edge computing aims to deploy and manage applications so that developers are unaware of challenges associated with dynamic management, sharing, and maintenance of the edge infrastructure. However, this is a non-trivial task because the resource usage by various edge applications varies based

Enhancing Video Analytics Accuracy via Real-time Automated Camera Parameter Tuning

In Video Analytics Pipelines (VAP), Analytics Units (AUs) such as object detection and face recognition running on remote servers critically rely on surveillance cameras to capture high-quality video streams in order to achieve high accuracy. Modern IP cameras come with a large number of camera parameters

Why is the video analytics accuracy fluctuating, and what can we do about it?

It is a common practice to think of a video as a sequence of images (frames), and re-use deep neural network models that are trained only on images for similar analytics tasks on videos. In this paper, we show that this “leap of faith” that deep learning models that work well on images will also

Efficient Compression Method for Roadside LiDAR Data

Roadside LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors are recently being explored for intelligent transportation systems aiming at safer and faster traffic management and vehicular operations. A key challenge in such systems is to efficiently transfer massive point-cloud data from the roadside LiDAR devices

5GLoR: 5G LAN Orchestration for Enterprise IoT Applications

5G-LAN is an enterprise local area network (LAN) that leverages 5G technology for wireless connectivity instead of WiFi. 5G technology is unique: it uses network slicing to distinguish customers in the same traffic class using new QoS technologies in the RF domain. This unique ability is not supported

DataXc: Flexible and efficient communication in microservices-based stream analytics pipelines

A big challenge in changing a monolithic application into a performant microservices-based application is the design of efficient mechanisms for microservices to communicate with each other. Prior proposals range from custom point-to-point communication among microservices using protocols like gRPC to

Application-specific, Dynamic Reservation of 5G Compute and Network Resources by using Reinforcement Learning

5G services and applications explicitly reserve compute and network resources in today’s complex and dynamic infrastructure of multi-tiered computing and cellular networking to ensure application-specific service quality metrics, and the infrastructure providers charge the 5G services for the resources

Cosine Similarity based Few-Shot Video Classifier with Attention-based Aggregation

Meta learning algorithms for few-shot video recognition use complex, episodic training but they often fail to learn effective feature representations. In contrast, we propose a new and simpler few-shot video recognition method that does not use meta-learning, but its performance compares well with the

Chimera: Context-Aware Splittable Deep Multitasking Models for Edge Intelligence

Design of multitasking deep learning models has mostly focused on improving the accuracy of the constituent tasks, but the challenges of efficiently deploying such models in a device-edge collaborative setup (that is common in 5G deployments) has not been investigated. Towards this end, in this paper,

ROMA: Resource Orchestration for Microservices-based 5G Applications

With the growth of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing and cloud computing technologies, the infrastructure (compute and network) available to emerging applications (AR/VR, autonomous driving, industry 4.0, etc.) has become quite complex. There are multiple tiers of computing (IoT devices, near

DataXe: A System for Application Self-optimization in Serverless Edge Computing Environments

A key barrier to building performant, remotely managed and self-optimizing multi-sensor, distributed stream processing edge applications is high programming complexity. We recently proposed DataX [1], a novel platform that improves programmer productivity by enabling easy exchange, transformations, and

AQuA: Analytical Quality Assessment for Optimizing Video Analytics Systems

Millions of cameras at edge are being deployed to power a variety of different deep learning applications. However, the frames captured by these cameras are not always pristine – they can be distorted due to lighting issues, sensor noise, compression etc. Such distortions not only deteriorate visual

Edge-based fever screening system over private 5G

Edge computing and 5G have made it possible to perform analytics closer to the source of data and achieve super-low latency response times, which isn’t possible with centralized cloud deployment. In this paper, we present a novel fever screening system, which uses edge machine learning techniques and

Magic-Pipe: Self-optimizing video analytics pipelines

Microservices-based video analytics pipelines routinely use multiple deep convolutional neural networks. We observe that the best allocation of resources to deep learning engines (or microservices) in a pipeline, and the best configuration of parameters for each engine vary over time, often at a timescale

SmartSlice: Dynamic, Self-optimization of Application’s QoS requests to 5G networks

Applications can tailor a network slice by specifying a variety of QoS attributes related to application-specific performance, function or operation. However, some QoS attributes like guaranteed bandwidth required by the application do vary over time. For example, network bandwidth needs of video streams

CamTuner: Reinforcement Learning based System for Camera Parameter Tuning to enhance Analytics

Video analytics systems critically rely on video cameras, which capture high quality video frames, to achieve high analytics accuracy. Although modern video cameras often expose tens of configurable parameter settings that can be set by end users, deployment of surveillance cameras today often uses a

UAC: An Uncertainty-Aware Face Clustering Algorithm

We investigate ways to leverage uncertainty in face images to improve the quality of the face clusters. We observe that popular clustering algorithms do not produce better quality clusters when clustering probabilistic face representations that implicitly model uncertainty – these algorithms predict

AppSlice: A system for application-centric design of 5G and edge computing applications

Applications that use edge computing and 5G to improve response times consume both compute and network resources. However, 5G networks manage only network resources without considering the application’s compute requirements, and container orchestration frameworks manage only compute resources without

DataX: A system for Data eXchange and transformation of streams

The exponential growth in smart sensors and rapid progress in 5G networks is creating a world awash with data streams. However, a key barrier to building performant multi-sensor, distributed stream processing applications is high programming complexity. We propose DataX, a novel platform that improves

F3S: Free Flow Fever Screening

Identification of people with elevated body temperature can reduce or dramatically slow down the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19. We present a novel fever-screening system, F 3 S, that uses edge machine learning techniques to accurately measure core body temperatures of multiple individuals

ECO: Edge-Cloud Optimization of 5G applications

Centralized cloud computing with 100+ milliseconds network latencies cannot meet the tens of milliseconds to sub-millisecond response times required for emerging 5G applications like autonomous driving, smart manufacturing, tactile internet, and augmented or virtual reality. We describe a new, dynamic