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NEC opens first Advanced Centre for Experimentation (ACE) in Singapore

By Alvin Soon - on 3 Aug 2017, 2:41pm

NEC opens first Advanced Centre for Experimentation (ACE) in Singapore

Image source: NEC Advanced Centre for Experimentation

NEC has officially opened its first Advanced Centre for Experimentation (ACE). Located in Singapore and operated by NEC Laboratories Singapore (NLS), ACE is a “living lab” for proof of concepts developed using NEC core technologies for businesses and governments.

Most of us would know NEC for their projectors, but the Japanese company is also a leading information and communications technology provider with expertise in fields like biometric identification, carrier networks, multimedia displays, smart energy, and more, with five R&D labs around the world, including NLS.

NEC’s face recognition technology, for example, has recently been crowned number one in Face In Video Evaluation (FIVE) by the United States’ National Institute of Standards and Technology. NEC’s face recognition technology, NeoFace, has been employed in cities like Tigre, Argentina, to help reduce vehicle theft.

During my visit to ACE, NEC also showed me a prototype of a body camera that, connected to an Intel compute stick, power pack, and running NeoFace, could identify wanted persons within one to two seconds of scanning through a crowd.

Unfortunately, while NEC might do a lot of interesting work with businesses and governments, these are usually the kinds of projects that they can’t talk about. One of the few case studies they can mention is how NLS partnered with SBS Buses to launch Singapore’s first telematics monitoring system, consisting of eco-drive sensors that monitor and analyze bus captains’ driving behavior.

NEC also announced that they will invest more than S$100 million in the Asia Pacific region over the next five years, mainly for research and development, and that ACE in Singapore is the “heart of this investment,” according to Tetsuro Akagi, Senior VP of NEC Corporation and CEO of NEC Asia Pacific.

As to why Singapore was chosen as the site for ACE, Akagi said that, “Singapore is a vitally important strategic base for NEC, because of the people, multi-nationality and more importantly, how the Government has changed and maintain Singapore as one of the safest cities in the world for living and ease of doing business through initiatives like Smart Nation.”

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