January 23, 2025

Mission

NEC Laboratories Europe is working to solve the society’s core challenges by pushing the boundaries of information and communications technologies such as AI, network, and computing platforms. Through such efforts, we aim to deliver new value to NEC’s global business and contribute to further expansion of business.

We at NEC Laboratories Europe present our original research at top conferences and collaborate with universities, research institutes, and potential users to bring breakthrough technology innovations. NEC Laboratories Europe provides researchers with opportunities to choose and develop their research themes and translate their finding to real-world solutions from ideation to commercialization. Being at NEC Laboratories Europe, researchers can share scientific insights provided by the world’s top researchers.

Focus Areas

NEC Laboratories Europe primarily focuses on and engages in the following technological areas among information and communications technologies:

Our activities in each focus area are as follows:

AI

NEC Laboratories Europe is a leader in AI research, including generative AI and explainable AI, which explains AI’s predictions and determination process, as well as GraphAI, which achieves machine learning and reasoning for graph-based data such as multi-modal data and relational data. Generative AIs based on large language models (LLMs) are transforming society. At the same time, an AI’s decision-making process remains to be unclear in most part, and the demand for transparency in this process is growing than ever before. Our developments in explainable AI are helping ensure that AI systems are safe and that their predictions and explanations are both understandable and correct, thereby increasing users’ trust in AI systems. GraphAI technology is contributing to digital transformation in various material industries. Notably in the biomedical field, the neoantigen prediction pipeline is a key component of NEC’s Immune Profiler technology. As part of AI application, advanced AI techniques are integrated with computational methods to accurately simulate physical and chemical systems, which leads to breakthrough advances in materials sciences and medical informatics.

6G Networks

The transition from 5G to 6G technology opens mobile networks to new vertical industry applications and services that are beyond the traditional domain of telecommunications. NEC is also a major developer and provider of emerging radio access and beyond-5G network technologies. NEC Laboratories Europe is one of Europe’s leading research organizations in mobile network technology, particularly aiming at contributing to the effective use of flexible and efficient mobile network bands through standardization and the research and development of O-RAN technology for radio access. Our goal is to create mobile networks that are highly energy-efficient with a low carbon footprint. We also aim to deliver networks that support new use cases for vertical applications and services in smart cities, autonomous driving, industry 4.0 and digital health.

Security

NEC Laboratories Europe is a leader in cybersecurity and decentralized security for Web 3.0. Our cyber threat intelligence technology creates virtual AI agents that complement and assist human cybersecurity experts in their tasks, while providing actionable and timely insights into concrete and relevant cyber threats. NEC Laboratories Europe also applies decentralized chains of trust to deliver user authentications and permissions using smart devices. AI will continue to transform the world we live in. At NEC Laboratories Europe, we are committed to building a safe foundation for machine learning by providing a privacy toolset for AI data and computation, as well as protection against attacks. Our efforts include ensuring that AIs are not deceived by adversarial samples and training data is not poisoned. For privacy, our aim is to protect data used in training from leakage, as well as prevent leakage of internal AI models.

Computing Platforms for AI

NEC Laboratories Europe is also a leader in foundational models for AI. Computer systems are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous. Our AI acceleration technology called “SOL,” achieves accelerated machine learning processing without relying on computational hardware, which also contributes to a significant acceleration in complex computational pipelines for vaccine development. To facilitate software development, NEC Laboratories Europe develops technologies that automate the generation of high-performance software for both computing and networking platforms by means of automating the modeling and behavior analysis of system components.

For more information, visit https://www.neclab.eu/.