Japanese firms provides technology training to researcher from Asia

At the NEC central R&D center, under the theme of creating promising and valuable solutions for the various needs of society, advanced research is conducted.

Many foreign, including Asian researchers and employees are actively working.

Mr. Liu is a researcher from China, participating in the research and development of face recognition technologies, with the aim of designing the most accurate and face recognition algorithm in the world.

"My research topic is related to the video research, video retrieval for very large scale surveillance cameras," said Jianquan Liu, Researcher from China.

The results of the research are recognized worldwide. The research has been awarded first place four times in a row in a US government organization benchmark test.

Products using this technology have been adopted in more than 40 countries worldwide to help build a secure and smart society.

"Let's check out the search. You can see at the right side, the result has been return by our system, it's very fast," added Liu.

Karan Rampal of India and other researchers work into profiling across spatio-temporal data or so-called video retrieval technology is the driving force behind this research.

It enables facial recognition to be delivered tens of times faster than traditional methods.

"Most of my co-workers are very young researchers, similar to my age. So I feel very comfortable in asking them for help, asking questions. Not only related to work, but also daily activities," said Karan Rampal, Researcher from India.

Employing human resources from all over the world will give birth to technologies and services that are more advanced and useful in society.

"I think NEC is a very interesting company, because most of its solution nowadays focus on social solutions, which I've always want to work on," said Salita Sombatsiri, Researcher from Thailand.

"Maybe discipline and dedication to work. I think in Japan, maybe there is some kind of pursuit of excellence. Especially in NEC, if you want to provide some value to the society, I think that quality should be very important," said Wemer M. Wee, Researcher from Philippines.

In Japan, today, artificial intelligence is being considered as a possible solution to replace humans with machines so as to address problems of labor scarcity, declining birthrate and aging population.

In addition, advanced technology is blending with the culture, and will continue to blend even further.

This is the Japan that has merged with the world's most popular anime culture of Japan and attempts to use artificial intelligence.

Virtual original anime characters equipped with artificial intelligence conversation systems appear in a life-like, large digital signage.

Among four country languages: English, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, these characters can respond to questions, and provide information about directions. This has become beneficial for the many foreigners who visit inbound Japanese markets.

In addition, these characters with sensing capabilities take advantage of accumulated large data in trend analysis.

"One great feature is that, a character can talk to a person while capturing their age, sex, or facial expression of the person who is standing in front of them," said Manager, AI Strategy Division, Tifana.com Co., Ltd., Youta Yokoyama.

Another recent technology is virtual reality.

Normal VR head mount displays have a viewing angle of 110 degrees, however, they are still narrower than the 210 degrees viewing angle of humans.

This is one of the few in the world, a first for Japan, where there is a viewing angle of 220 degrees in the head mount display. It exceeds a human's viewing angle and can observe the total horizontal field of view.

It is an unprecedented virtual experience. Development costs prohibit the device from being marketed as a consumer product, but can be expected to be used in special fields such as architecture.

"For those customers like relating to the construction field. They need to have a view of the whole house. We're going to provide this product for those needs to view an object not seen from a narrow viewing angle," said Yasutoshi Yamamoto, Platform Development Center, Panasonic Corporation.

Definitely, devices and services using the latest technologies will make life more convenient for all of us. 

-ANI