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Iain Melvin is a Researcher in the Machine Learning Department at NEC Laboratories America, where he develops scalable and trustworthy AI systems for real-world applications. His work focuses on human–computer interaction, user interface development, and full-stack systems that enable effective interaction with complex AI models. He builds cloud-based platforms and data pipelines that support intelligent document analysis, collaborative language model agents and video understanding across domains such as healthcare and manufacturing.
In addition, Iain explores creative model design and practical machine learning applications, developing novel ways to apply AI to real-world problems. His work emphasizes building usable, reliable, and transparent systems by combining human-centered design with robust engineering practices, helping bridge the gap.
Overview: In problems with a large number of labels, most multi-label and multi-class techniques incur a significant computational burden at test time. This is because, for each test instance, they need to systematically evaluate every label to decide whether it is relevant for the instance or not.
Overview: This research project is at the forefront of integrating advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) into the process of deriving actionable insights from vast and complex document repositories. This initiative focuses on creating a system that allows users to interact with the LLM, guiding its analysis and refining the results based on the user’s expertise and evolving needs.
Overview: We have developed a system for real-time scene understanding and reasoning across various domains such as safety, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and personal assistance. This system continuously monitors and analyzes video, acoustics, and time series data related to human activities, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of ongoing situations. The project utilizes advanced AI models to process large volumes of data, generating actionable insights that help users grasp complex scenarios.
Overview: The Trustworthy Generative AI Project is focused on developing advanced multimodal generative models that can create and reason with content across text, images, reports, and 3D videos. These models are designed for applications in advertisement, entertainment, law enforcement, and healthcare.
We study the problem of subgroup discovery for survival analysis, where the goal is to find an interpretable subset of the data on which a Cox model is highly accurate. We examine why existing quality functions are insufficient for this problem and introduce two technical innovations: the expected prediction
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.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in offline video action detection, but their reliance on processing fixed-size clips with full spatio-temporal attention makes them computationally expensive and ill-suited for real-time streaming applications due to massive computational
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text, yet they largely operate as reactive agents, responding only when directly prompted. This passivity creates an “awareness gap,” limiting their potential as truly collaborative partners
Adapting large Video-Language Models (VLMs) for action detection using only a few examples poses challenges like overfitting and the granularity mismatch between scene-level pre-training and required person-centric understanding. We propose an efficient adaptation strategy combining parameter-efficient
Multi-camera multi-object tracking (MCMOT) faces significant challenges in maintaining consistent object identities across varying camera perspectives, particularly when precise calibration and extensive annotations are required. In this paper, we present CalibFree, a self-supervised representation learning
We study the problem of subgroup discovery with Cox regression models and introduce a method for finding an interpretable subset of the data on which a Cox model is highly accurate. Our method relies on two technical innovations: the emph (Unknown sysvar: (expected prediction entropy)), a novel metric
NEC Labs America is proud to attend NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver, Canada from December 10-15. Zachary Izzo will present Subgroup Discovery with the Cox Model, Shaobo Han will present VB-LoRA: Extreme Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning with Vector Banks and Jonathan Warrell will present Discrete-Continuous
Multi-camera tracking plays a pivotal role in various real-world applications. While end-to-end methods have gained significant interest in single-camera tracking, multi-camera tracking remains predominantly reliant on heuristic techniques. In response to this gap, this paper introduces Multi-Camera
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our latest research initiative, the Trustworthy Generative AI Project. This ambitious project is set to revolutionize how we interact with multimodal content by developing cutting-edge generative models capable of compositional generation and reasoning across
In this paper, we introduce efforts to apply large language models (LLMs) to the field of material development. NEC is advancing the development of a material development platform. By applying core technologies corresponding to two material development steps, namely investigation activities (Read paper/patent)
Human actions often involve complex interactions across several inter-related objects in the scene. However, existing approaches to fine-grained video understanding or visual relationship detection often rely on single object representation or pairwise object relationships. Furthermore, learning interactions
