Pursuit of Cutting-edge Technology,
Based on the Strategic Partnership.

VALWAY Technology Center, the R&D arm of NEC Soft, is an incubator of business of tomorrow.
Attracted by the creation of new technologies, VALWAY Technology Center's mission is to be a pioneer of new technological frontiers.

VALWAY Technology Center accelerates business creation, through the combination of experimental technology, based on the solid IT know-how, and active alliances with laboratories, universities, and venture companies, which have proven to be suppliers of technological innovations.

Research Area

Biotechnology

We are now focusing on the research and development of aptamer-related technology. The aptamer is a kind of functional nucleic acid which has a specific binding activity against many kinds of target molecules such as ion, chemical, small molecule, protein, virus and micro-organism. We are able to integrate the novel informational or computational methods to select, modify and design aptamers. Novel aptamers have high potentials as a bio-business material such as next-generation sensor, diagnostic tool for many kinds of diseases, the detection tool of the conformational change of target protein, sensitive food test detector and more. To realize our novel aptamer solution, this biotechnology group is working with some Japanese and foreign companies to co-develop our ideas toward the new biotechnology markets.

Machine Vision Technology

As a unique technology of natural computing, we develop an automatic human characteristic analyzer, which automatically identifies age and gender of a person captured by surveillance cameras. As a solution for this system particularly in shopping mall or department stores, application of the analyzer in the highly accurate real-time marketing system is expected.
Moreover, this technology has the possibility of the application in many fields (ex. security), and we will make efforts to develop other applications in the future.

Usability Engineering

In order to improve our software products more usable, we introduce usability engineering. In software development process, it is accomplished by human centered design(HCD) process,which is defined by ISO13407.
Our main activities are as follows.

1. To set up our software development process based on HCD
2. To create some useful design tools
3. To train usability engineers

Through our activities, all of our products will be of high quality of use and all of our customers will surely use our systems with more satisfaction.

Software Development Environment Technology

"Mashup" means a technology that integrates a lot of Web Service on the Internet together in order to realize the customer's requirement.
Now, this technology is often used for the Web site for consumers, but sooner or later it will become an important technology that mash various applications and Web Service in the enterprise system.
We are researching Mashup runtime environment that extremely innovate the business world in the future.

Also, as a part of our contribution to open source software communities, we had been driving the Japanese community to develop the language pack for Eclipse IDE.
As a result, Japanese Language Pack for Eclipse 3.3 was released in May 2008.
We will continue the contribution to those communities.