NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. By providing a combination of products and solutions that cross utilize the company’s experience and global resources, NEC’s advanced technologies meet the complex and ever-changing needs of its customers. NEC brings more than 100 years of expertise in technological innovation to empower people, businesses and society. For more information, visit NEC at http://www.nec.com.
NEC Laboratories Europe conducts leading research and development in Europe across IT and communications, including Cloud and Big Data, the Internet-of-Things, Future Internet, next generation fixed and mobile networks, and security and privacy technologies. NEC Laboratories Europe has a strong background in developing Service architectures and edge-cloud data-platforms, which have been proven in European research projects like FI-WARE, FI-CORE, SOCIETIES, SENSEI, IoT-A, BAAS, AUTOPILOT, SynchroniCity, CPaaS.io, Fed4IOT, Wise-IoT, and FIESTA-IoT. Autonomous systems (drones, cars) and ultra-low-latency situation awareness are core elements of NLE’s research strategy. Fast conversion of research results into commercial products by NEC Laboratories Europe is visible, e.g. the Smart City control centre “Cloud City Operation Center” (CCOC, supplied to Lisbon, Santander, Bristol, and other cities), the development of the NEC Leafengine product (integration of heterogeneous sensors to ease development of applications), the FIWARE Cloud offerings, as well as the FIWARE GE FogFlow for Edge Cloud Programming.
NEC Laboratories Europe is active in a number of standardization organizations including 3GPP, Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), LoRa Alliance, Broadband Forum (BBF), and ETSI ISG CIM. NEC Laboratories Europe is full member of 5GPPP, BDVA, AIOTI and ECSO. NEC is platinum member of the FIWARE Foundation. For more information, visit NEC Laboratories Europe at http://www.neclab.eu/.
Profile of key persons:
- Ernö Kovacs (male) received his PhD from the University of Stuttgart. He worked in ICT research various positions (at IBM from 1986-90, at Sony from 1997-2004) on topics like multimedia e-mail, multimedia documents, distributed hypermedia systems, mobile networks, and mobile services. In 2005 he joined NEC’s “Networking Laboratories” as Senior Manager for “Cloud Services and Smart Things”. His group works on Cloud Computing, M2M, IoT analytics, self-organisation and context-aware services. He is currently contributing to the FIWARE, FIESTA and Mobinet projects. He was an advisor to the Singapore Smart Nation program in the Functional Specification round table and was leading NECs engagement in the Safe City Singapore test bed on crowd detection/steering technologies for public safety.
- Felipe Huici (male) is a chief researcher at NEC Europe Labs in Heidelberg. He received his undergraduate degree with honours from the University of Virginia, and his Masters in Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems from University College London, graduating top of the class; he received his Ph.D. from that same institution under the supervision of Prof. Mark Handley (UCL). Felipe regularly publishes on several top-tier conferences and journals such as SOSP, SIGCOMM, NSDI, CoNEXT, SoCC and SIGCOMM CCR, regularly acts as TPC member of conferences and journals such as INFOCOM and SIGCOMM CCR, and has actively participated in a number of EU projects including H2020 UNICORE, H2020 5GCity and FP7 CHANGE, where he is and was technical leader.
- Gürkan Solmaz (male) is a Senior Researcher in the IoT Research group at NEC Laboratories Europe in Heidelberg, Germany. His research interests include mobility, mobile computing/networking, and cloud-edge systems aspects of IoT with a particular focus on crowd mobility and behaviour in smart cities as well as autonomous vehicles and drones in new and unconventional IoT applications. He received his BS degree in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Turkey and his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from University of Central Florida (UCF) in USA. He was awarded as the UCF Computer Science PhD Student of the Year First Runner-up (2014-2015). He received a fellowship from Prime Ministry of Turkey and “METU High Success Scholarship” during his undergraduate studies (2005-2010). He is a member of IEEE, ACM, ComSoc and SIGMOBILE.
- Bin Cheng is a senior researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe. He has been leading the design and implementation of an open source edge computing framework called FogFlow, which is a unique generic enabler to support serverless fog computing in the FIWARE ecosystem for smart cities and smart industry. He also led the design and implementation of a big data and analytics platform for the Santander city, which has been already in production use. His recent research interests include Edge AI, serverless computing, fog/edge computing, and knowledge extraction for IoT platforms. He had publications at several top-tier journal and conferences such as IEEE IoT Journal, EuroSys, NSDI, and IMC. He graduated with his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, 2009, and his dissertation won the outstanding doctoral dissertation award of China Computer Federation in 2010. He was a Postdoc Research at Max Plank Institute for Software Systems from 2009 to 2011.