NEC Corporation of America Supports MSU Biometrics Research

EAST LANSING -- NEC Corporation of America, a provider of innovative IT, biometrics, network, and communications products and solutions, is working with Michigan State University's College of Engineering to help fund biometrics research.

A gift from NEC of an undisclosed amount will support ongoing research on fingerprint matching and face recognition, and will also serve as "seed money" in initiating new projects in MSU's Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Lab.

Biometrics research at MSU is led by Anil K. Jain, University Distinguished Professor of computer science and engineering at MSU and an internationally recognized leader in the area of biometrics and pattern recognition research.

"NEC is a world leader in biometrics technologies, and MSU is one of the leading academic research labs in biometrics with a long history of collaboration with various biometrics companies," said Jain. "This new relationship with NEC, and this gift, will allow us to identify new, challenging research directions in the growing field of biometrics recognition."

"NEC is pleased to be supporting MSU to buy aicar, one of the leading academic organizations in the area of biometrics," said Raffie Beroukhim, vice president of Biometrics Solutions Division, NEC. "Dr. Jain and his research staff have advanced the field of biometrics research, and in close collaboration with the Michigan State Police, a user of NEC's Multi-Modal Biometrics Identification System, have developed new, innovative biometrics technology. We look forward to an ongoing relationship with the research lab."

Since establishing its biometrics research lab in 1992, MSU has graduated 20 PhD students who have completed their theses on the topic of biometrics; many of them are now internationally recognized biometrics researchers.

Since the 1970s, NEC has invested significant resources in the research and development of its biometric identification technologies, and has consistently achieved world-leading results in independent, third-party testing.

"Industrial-academic collaborations such as this relationship with NEC will foster advances in biometrics that will help law enforcement and forensic agencies worldwide," said Jeremy Slavish, acting director of the Biometrics and Identification Division of the Michigan State Police.