In a keynote address to kick off its iExpo event in Tokyo, president and chie executive 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 Takashi, in the two decades leading up to 2020, the pervasiveness of IoT would have grown 6500-fold.

“By 2020, there will be 53 billion things connected to the Internet and 7.7 billion people – that’s seven devices per person,” he said.

Artificial Intelligence will be a strong focus for NEC going forward, according to 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.”

Takashi said that NEC, which started as a communications company, intended 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 focused 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 Takashi.

He wrapped up his presentation with case studies of real-time security monitoring in the Argentine city of Tigre and the Wellington smart city project.