Japan, Aug. 18 -- NEC Corporation has been awarded a contract for "Research on Underwater Acoustic Foundation Models Using Self-Supervised Learning," with a focus on dual-use applications, as part of the "Innovative Breakthrough Research" program conducted by the Defense Innovation Science and Technology Institute of Japan's Agency for Defense Equipment. NEC has commenced research on this project and aims to complete development of a foundation model by fiscal year 2027.This project involves training a model on vast amounts of underwater acoustic data to build a world-leading foundational model for underwater acoustics. The goal is to realize general-purpose generative AI, similar to large language models (LLMs), in the field of underwater ...