Most accessed articles in the first half of 2019

NEC advocates “Digital Inclusion” as a future society where digital technology has penetrated every aspect of our lives. In order to successfully deploy technology as a solution to address societal issues, it must first gain public acceptance. Ensuring public understanding and consent is especially critical when utilizing advanced technologies, such as AI and biometric authentication. Introduced below are the ten most accessed articles on this topic during the period of April to September 2019.

Outline of Disaster Recovery Architecture

This paper discusses aspects of IT systems from their basic architectures to a function model of the disaster recovery (DR) that enables continued service provision even in the case of a disaster event. In doing so it focuses on data protection, which is the core of service continuity.

Advances in Face Detection and Recognition Technologies

This paper describes advances in the authors’ face detection and recognition technologies. For face detection, a hierarchical scheme for combined face and eye detection has been developed based on the Generalized Learning Vector Quantization method to achieve precise face alignment. For face recognition, the perturbation space method has been improved to reduce the adverse effects of illumination changes as well as pose changes by using a standard face model. Experimental results have revealed that the proposed method outperforms our previously employed method.

Radio Access Networks Design and Optimization Technology

The rapid advances in recent years of the broadband implementation of wireless networks, has raised the issue of service quality requirements for wireless systems to a similar level to that of wired systems. As equipment investments have increased, it is now strongly required that the system operation makes maximum use of the equipment performance and improves the user experience quality. NEC has developed the radio access network (RAN) quality improvement technique "RAN-SAITEKIKA", which makes full use of its radio access network design and optimization technology, and provides professional services in support of activities for improving user experience quality. This paper introduces the technology and achievement of RAN-SAITEKIKA together with details of its future perspectives.

Optical Submarine Cable Network Monitoring Equipment

The introduction of large-capacity wavelength-division multiplexing and OADM (Optical Add/Drop Multiplexing) technologies in optical submarine cable systems has led to an increase in the number of stations and complications in system configurations with regard to the necessity for connection management per wavelength band, etc. This trend has increased the need for submarine monitoring equipment that can control an entire network by crossing over the barriers of traditional management systems. This paper describes the requirements of operations management systems that are capable of dealing with complicated optical submarine networks together with discussion of some of NEC’s solutions.

Extremely-Large-Scale Biometric Authentication System - Its Practical Implementation

The Indian Unique ID (UID) is an extremely-large-scale system that attempts to identify India’s 1.2 billion people, which is about 1/6th of the world population, using biometric authentication. As there are also other countries studying the introduction of national-scale authentication systems, NEC is currently conducting related R&D for the implementation of such systems. This paper describes a suitable system for use in processing of extremely large-scale biometric information.

SIP Telephony Server UNIVERGE SV7000

The rapid expansion of mobile communications traffic that has taken place over the past few years has also led to the need for larger network capacity in mobile backhaul. However, telecom carriers around the world face severe price competition, making it difficult to pass on increased CAPEX and OPEX costs to subscribers. This means that it has become critical for telecom carriers to meet the needs of subscribers, while increasing network capacity and enhancing efficiency - all without increasing spending. This paper discusses the measures NEC’s commitment is taking to solve these problems, focusing in particular on a solution tailored for telecom carriers in Russia.

Asset Management Solution Based on RFID

NEC is introducing an asset management solution making full use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification.) This policy will be aimed at the enhancement of information security, software license management and improvements in job/asset efficiency. The integration of asset-related information, updating the latest information and identification of the locations of assets will be thus enabled. In particular, the use of RFID will provide solutions for the possibility of identifying information regarding the location of assets and the movement of goods. In systems terms, the information on the RFID tag is captured by the RFID reader, and this information is sent through the RFID Manager to the Location Information Middleware. The Location Information Middleware then converts the RFID reader’s information into location information; the location information and the RFID tag information are sent on to the Integrated Asset Management Database. Here the location information is tied to the asset information so that the asset location information can be identified in real time.

Data Mining for Security

It becomes increasingly important to detect intrusions with unknown patterns in order to protect our business from cyber terrorism threats. This paper introduces data mining technologies designed for this purpose; SmartSifter (outlier detection engine), ChangeFinder (change-point detection engine), AccessTracer (anomalous behavior detection engine). All of them are able to learn statistical patterns of logs adaptively and to detect intrusions as statistical anomalies relative to the learned patterns. We briefly overview the principles of these engines and illustrate their applications to network intrusion detection, worm detection, and masquerader detection.

The Next-Generation FMC (Fixed-Mobile Convergence) Core Network

The IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) is an IP-based communication system defined by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), which is the organization that approves standards for the W-CDMA technology. It features the capability of access connections from fixed networks as well as continuing its original purpose of enabling cellular phone access connections. This means that the IMS offers an architecture that is capable of implementing the FMC (Fixed-Mobile Convergence). NEC is implementing FMC using the IMS as well as researching the AIPN (All-IP Network) at the same time with the aim of further improving its performance.

Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design - Solution-Based Approaches to Innovation and Problem-Solving in Social Environment

Design Thinking is widely regarded as critical for companies committed to building a more creative and innovative company culture. Two components are key to this new approach - Design Thinking and Social-Centered Design (SCD), which are both built on and derived from human-centered design (HCD). In HCD-based Design Thinking, the focus is on a more collaborative and iterative style that combines creative design approaches to generate empathic, human-centered innovation processes. One aspect that is of particular importance to this approach is reframing from the perspective of user experience (UX). Moving from the individual user’s perspective to that of the social environment as a whole, SCD retains the HCD while applying it to the broader social environment in which the user lives and functions. In this context, social environment business models and social experience (SX) play an integral role.
In this paper, we will look at how SCD fits into the overall concept of Design Thinking and how these concepts can be integrated into corporate culture and innovation processes to create a more dynamic, forward-thinking, and socially aware company optimally positioned to meet the needs of its customers.