NEW YORK, NY — NEC Laboratories America (NEC Labs) and the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) have announced that they will collaborate on cutting edge research. The collaboration will seek to explore challenges in areas of shared interest, such as generative modeling for photorealistic simulation of 4D dynamic scenes in autonomous driving.
As part of the research collaboration, NEC Labs has joined the Smart Streetscapes Advisory Board to strategically advise CS3 and work with the Center on research collaborations, joint funding opportunities, convenings, and more.
The collaboration was formally announced on Thursday, April 24th at CS3’s Accelerator Demo Day on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus. NEC Labs President Chris White delivered the keynote address, discussing his vision for how industry labs and university researchers can collaborate. Chris also provided the accelerator teams with valuable guidance, such as not confusing technical difficulty with commercial value. Later in the event, CS3 students presented their startup ideas in a pitch session.
CS3 is the largest federally funded engineering research center focused on purpose-built technology solutions for the streetscape. The Center was established in 2022 through a $26 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to its core partners: Columbia University, Florida Atlantic University, Rutgers University, University of Central Florida, and Lehman College. CS3 works together with industry, government, and community stakeholders to ensure the development of a rich ecosystem of streetscape applications that can help resolve the challenges being faced by communities. NEC Labs joins about a dozen other industry and government members on the Smart Streetscapes Advisory Board.
“We are thrilled to welcome NEC Labs as a key collaborator. Their focus on problem-driven research is a fantastic fit within the Center’s research priorities and innovation ecosystem, and we look forward to working closely with their impressive team,” said Andrew Smyth, Director of CS3 and Professor of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University.
About NEC Labs
NEC Laboratories America, Inc. is the US-based center for NEC Corporation’s global network of corporate research laboratories. We aspire to perform problem-driven research motivated by fundamental human needs with the intent to remove critical barriers and open new commercial markets. We seek hard problems at the forefront of knowledge with an expectation that we may fail as often as we succeed. In failure we will gain critical insights that fuel future success. In success we publish our results in top journals as active participants in the academic community. Importantly, we engage with NEC business units to use these disruptive solutions to create key differentiation in NEC products and platforms, opening new markets and providing a competitive advantage to NEC Corporation.
About CS3
The Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) is an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center that seeks to develop technological solutions to address community-driven problems, such as public safety, traffic efficiency and hyper-local environment sensing. For more information on the Center for Smart Streetscapes, sign up for the monthly newsletter on the Center website. For partnership and Advisory Board inquiries, reach out to [email protected].