Grant research topics
Beyond 5G and 6G
- Secure, beyond 5G systems
- Smart edge systems
- Smart/reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
- Virtualized mobile network systems
- Wireless sensing
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
- Discrete-continuous learning
- Explainable AI
- Graph-based and geometric deep learning
- Information extraction
- Knowledge-intensive NLP
Privacy and Security
- Adversarial learning or privacy-preserving machine learning
- Distributed systems security and privacy
- Formal methods and policy compliance checkers
- TEE security
- Privacy enhancing technologies
Software Systems
- Programming models, languages and compilers
- Program synthesis for high-performance computing
- Scalable monitoring for cloud and edge-cloud systems
- Software for heterogeneous systems
NEC student and postdoc research grant recipients
NEC Laboratories conducts advanced theoretical and applied technology research to help realize new technology for the betterment of all.
Current or former NEC student and postdoc fellows are undertaking or have carried out research in the areas of: machine learning, beyond 5G cellular networks, security, operating systems and hardware virtualization. Their work has the strong potential to advance research in key areas of their respective disciplines including network slicing, acceleration of graph neural networks and hardware virtualization.
Our fellows represent leading universities and research institutions from around the world, including Austria, France, Spain and the United States.
Visit their profiles to learn more!
Seungone Kim
University
Carnegie Mellon UniversityLocation
Pennsylvania, United StatesAcademic background
Seungone received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Yonsei University, Korea, and Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His works have been published at ML/CL conferences including ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ACL and EMNLP.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My primary research focus is to establish a science of language model (LM) behaviors. Concretely, my research interests include: (1) developing LLM Evaluation Frameworks that systematically identify what specific capabilities language models lack and (2) looping back the insights acquired from evaluation to train stronger LMs for weak-to-strong generalization. For my NEC fellowship project, I will explore how we can systematically assess and predict how synthetic data could help the performance of language models on a wide range of tasks.”
Emmy Liu
University
Carnegie Mellon UniversityLocation
Pennsylvania, United StatesAcademic background
Emmy received her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Toronto in 2021. She is currently a PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, United States. Her work regularly appears at leading natural language processing and machine learning conferences, and she received the Best Paper Resource Award at ACL 2023.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My research interests include understanding and evaluating the ability of language models to perform complex reasoning and demonstrate both understanding and generation of creative language. For my NEC fellowship project, I will focus on examining how training methods and data contribute to improving the ability of models to reason step by step, and the special effects of training on structured data, such as code.”
Erik Arakelyan
University
University of CopenhagenLocation
Copenhagen, DenmarkAcademic background
Erik received his Master of Science in Machine Learning from University College London (UCL) in 2019. He is a machine learning researcher and has worked as a Technology Lead at Arm in the UK. Erik is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH), Denmark, specializing in topics of knowledge graph optimizations and explainability in NLP. His work received an outstanding paper award at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2021.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
"My research interests include knowledge graph optimizations and explainability in NLP. For my NEC fellowship, I am focusing on complex multi-hop reasoning for explainable fact-checking. This involves expanding complex reasoning paradigms from neuro-symbolic approaches into an explainable reasoning system for large language models. This can highly impact the field of fact-checking and open-domain question answering, leading to more robust, explainable and safer models."
Sergi Abadal
University
Universitat Politècnica de CatalunyaLocation
Barcelona, SpainAcademic background
Sergi received his Bachelors of Science in Telecommunication Engineering in 2010 and Masters (Hons) in 2011. He completed his PhD in Computer Architecture (Hons) from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 2016. Sergi has been a visiting researcher at the University of Illinois, Georgia Institute of Technology and the Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH) in Greece.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My current research interests are in the areas of chip-scale communications and next-generation computer architectures. My NEC fellowship project proposes iGNNspector, a framework for the acceleration of Graph Neural Networks (GNN), whose unique graph-driven structure renders their computation challenging. I will investigate how to apply graph profiling to speed up the processing of GNNs with software and hardware techniques.”
Stella Bitchebe
University
École normale supérieure de LyonLocation
Lyon, FranceAcademic background
Stella received her engineering degree from Polytechnique school of Yaounde, Cameroon in 2018, and first came to France for her end-of-course internship at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) in France. She obtained her PhD position with the University of Nice at the I3S Laboratory under the supervision of Professor Alain Tchana. Stella is currently working at the Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme (LIP) at École normale supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon) where she is completing her PhD.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
"My research mainly focuses on Operating Systems and Hardware Virtualization. The NEC fellowship project is about a new principle that we called OoH, for Out of Hypervisor. The aim is to make some hardware virtualization features accessible to the guest user space environment, without the need for hypervisor intervention."
Pengfei Liu
University
Carnegie Mellon University (Language Technologies Institute)Location
Pennsylvania, United StatesAcademic background
Pengfei received his PhD from Fudan University in 2019, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, United States. He serves as the area chair for ACL, NAACL, EMNLP and NeurIPS, among others, and won the best demo paper award in ACL 2021. Other honors include multiple doctoral dissertation awards and scholarships. His recent projects (e.g., ReviewAdvisor, ExplainaBoard), have received attention from academia and industry.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My research currently focuses on text representation, generation and evaluation. For my NEC fellowship project, I will expand previous work done at CMU on ExplainaBoard, a methodology for systematic analysis of NLP systems, to the task of knowledge graph link prediction. This will include developing new methodology specific to this task (e.g., developing new ways to describe features of the predicted entities), as well as tailoring the interpretable evaluation methods to metrics commonly used for the task.”
Naram Mhaisen
University
Delft University of TechnologyLocation
The NetherlandsAcademic background
Naram received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering (with honors) and Master of Science in Computing from Qatar University (QU) in 2017 and 2020, respectively. Since 2017, he has worked as a researcher with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, QU, on projects funded by the Qatar National Research Fund. Projects included tackling efficient cloud storage systems, and reliable smart health system design over 5G Networks. Naram has obtained several awards, including “Distinguished Graduate Student Research”, QU, 2020, and “Microsoft Imagine Cup (Middle East and Africa)”, 2017. Naram is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics & Computer Science, at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
"My research interests include the modeling and optimization of networked systems. The NEC Fellowship will support my research on the safe incorporation of machine learning models into networks via robust optimistic network scheduling algorithms. Such algorithms perform as desired when the network conditions are as predicted, while maintaining a minimum performance guarantee if such predictions cease to meet reality e.g., due to the complicated dynamics of today’s networks."
Pouya Pezeshk Pour
University
University of California, IrvineLocation
California, United StatesAcademic background
Pouya received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 2015 from Sharif University of Technology in Iran. In 2018, he completed his Masters of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Irvine where he is currently pursuing his PhD.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My research interest involves various natural language processing-related tasks such as knowledge graph representation, interpretability and active learning. In this work, my goal is to provide a concept-based explanation for graph models, i.e., explaining complex behavior of the model via underlying concepts, characterizing the graph models behavior in a way that is understandable to humans. I will apply these techniques to tasks such as link prediction and node classification.”
Xuewen Qian
University
University Paris SaclayLocation
Paris, FranceAcademic background
Xuewen received his Bachelor and Masters (Hons) of Science degrees in Electronic Science and Technology in 2014 and 2017 from Central South University, Changsha, China. He received his PhD from Paris-Saclay University in 2020, awarded by the graduate school of engineering, CentraleSupelec. Xuewen’s doctoral research focused on the detection and synchronization issues of molecular communications at CentraleSupelec’s Laboratory of Signals and Systems.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My research interests are in machine learning, wireless communications and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). The focus of my research for NEC’s fellowship grant is the modeling, analyzing and optimizing of RIS-aided wireless communication systems from the perspective of the electromagnetic-compliant communication models. The aim of the research is to mitigate the mutual effect of RIS units in order to realize the practical RIS-assisted systems and implement the empirical experiments based on hardware platforms available at NEC Laboratories Europe.”
Alexander Schlögl
University
University of InnsbruckLocation
Innsbruck, AustriaAcademic background
Alexander completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck and received the Young academics prize for scientific research "Nachwuchspreis für wissenschaftliche Forschung" for his master’s thesis. He has authored and co-authored a number of scientific papers on the security of machine learning models.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My main research interest is the security of machine learning models, which I approach more from an engineering perspective. The NEC fellowship project I am working on aims to expand on my previous research on partial black-boxing of machine learning models. The goal is to develop a general toolchain that allows even non-experts to protect confidential model parameters while still allowing offline inference.”
Farbod Shahinfar
University
Politecnico di Milano, ItalyLocation
Milano, ItalyAcademic background
Farbod received his Bachelor of Science from the Iran University of Science and Technology in 2020, graduating cum laude. In 2022, he completed his Master of Science in Computer Software Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran. Farbod is currently a PhD candidate at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His work has been published at distinguished conferences and he received the ACM CoNEXT best poster award in 2021.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My research interests involve data center networks and operating systems. For my NEC fellowship project, I am trying to improve the performance of data center applications and reduce their energy consumption. Specifically, I am studying a compiler-driven approach to automatically decompose applications to programs that run on different levels of networking systems (hardware, operating systems and applications). This project aims to help with the development process of efficient applications suitable for data center environments.”
Jesús Pérez-Valero
University
University Carlos III de MadridLocation
Madrid, SpainAcademic background
Jesús received his Bachelor and Masters of Science degrees from the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Spain in 2019 and 2020 respectively. During this time, he undertook two oversees student residencies in Finland and Germany, and worked for two funded projects (Spanish and European). Since October 2020, he is a PhD candidate at the Department of Telematics of University Carlos III de Madrid.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My NEC fellowship project addresses the analysis and design of energy-efficient and highly-reliable services for 6G networks. While network slicing supports a more environmentally sustainable operation than existing schemes, the reliability requirements envisioned in 6G are far more stringent. The objective of the project is to design of scaling techniques that overcome these limitations.”
Vijay Viswanathan
University
Carnegie Mellon University (Language Technologies Institute)Location
Pennsylvania, United StatesAcademic background
Vijay received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Master of Science in Intelligent Information Systems degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in 2016 and 2022 respectively. He worked for several years on AI applications at different start-ups before returning to fundamental research. Vijay is currently a PhD candidate at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania.
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My research primarily aims to develop natural ways for experts to correct AI model behavior and build tools to enable AI systems development. For my NEC fellowship project, I am studying methods for human-in-the-loop clustering in challenging settings, such as clustering synonymous entities and relations from an open knowledge base. The goal is to make better use of user feedback during interactive clustering.”
Zhe Zeng
University
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)Location
California, United StatesAcademic background
Zhe received her Bachelor of Science with honors in Mathematics from Zhejiang University, China in 2018. She is now a third-year PhD student at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Research interests & NEC grant initiatives
“My research interest lies in real-world modeling problems that involve heterogeneous data, specifically both discrete and continuous data. Through my research, I focus on advancing probabilistic inference and designing learning approaches to cope with structured and heterogeneous data. In my NEC fellowship project, I will explore how the developed approaches can be leveraged to facilitate various fields including Bayesian deep learning.”