NEC Corporation is going to be working with a major Indian state to develop smart city solutions for one of its biggest cities. The company has just signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with AP Technology Services Limited (APTS), a state-owned company tasked with developing electronics, IT, and communications services.
The collaboration will be part of the Safe City Project for Tirupati, and, as the project name suggests, will focus on innovative technological security solutions for the city. While no specifics have yet been hammered out, in a statement NEC suggested that technologies used will include “facial recognition systems and automated fingerprint identification systems,” and that the project would investigate “a range of areas” including smart transit and transportation, as well as cyber security initiatives. Moreover, NEC will explore the potential for building dedicated R&D facilities to help implement the project.
It isn’t NEC’s first foray in the country: Just last week, the company announced a project to implement a CCTV-based facial recognition system in the city of Surat for use by municipal police. But NEC has also demonstrated its innovation in smart city technologies elsewhere, perhaps most notably in the recent case of a behavioral biometrics system designed to analyze crowd movements at a busy municipal district in Tokyo. Efforts like these have helped to establish NEC as a market leader in the eyes of analysts, and as such APTS should find itself satisfied with the efforts of its new partner going forward from their MOU.
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Jul 28, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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