AI, connectivity and security are the three key technology areas that Japanese tech giant NEC intends to target in order to capitalise on the massive explosion of the Internet of Things market currently under way.
In a keynote address to kick off its iExpo event in Tokyo, President and CEO of NEC Corporation Takashi Niino outlined his vision for his company’s push into the IoT market leading up to 2020 and beyond.
According to Mr Takashi, in the two decades leading up to 2020 the pervasiveness of IoT will have grown 6500 fold.
“By 2020, there will be 53 billion things connected to the Internet and 7.7 billion people – that’s 7 devices per person,” he said.
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“NEC is strong in visualisation and digitisation and there are three values we can offer to customers in the digital age – AI, connectivity and security.”
Artificial Intelligence will be a strong focus for NEC going forward, according to Mr Takashi, embodied in the company’s new flagship AI brand, NEC the Wise.
“We launched our new AI brand ‘NEC the WISE’ this year and we would like to be number one in the world through our AI technology,” he said, announcing the launch of the company’s latest product, NeoFace Image Data Mining.
“NEC the WISE products are hitting the market and today we are launching NeoFace Image Data Mining which combines two technologies – face recognition and profiling across spatio-temporal data.
“This enables people who have not been pre-registered to be identified almost immediately by their face from a large database of photographs.
“We have the number one technology in this area.”
Mr Takashi said that NEC, which started as a communications company, intends to focus on optimising the connectivity of customers in the era of IoT, using 5G and other wireless communications protocols.
In the area of security, the NEC offering will be particularly focussed on operational technologies for detecting unknown threats in advance, using lightweight monitoring software and real-time error detection.
“NEC has technology that recognises if a system is different in any way than normal. If so, it automatically isolates affected terminals only,” said Mr Takashi.
The NEC president wrapped his presentation up with case studies of real time security monitoring in the Argentinian city of Tigre and the Wellington smart city project.