Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

MERL engages in application-motivated basic research and advanced development in areas crucial to Mitsubishi Electric. The facility employs more than 50 PhDs who conduct research and development across a wide range of fields, including digital signal processing, digital audio and video processing, wired and wireless digital communications, spoken language interfaces, computer vision, mechatronics and fundamental algorithms. Since its founding in 1991, MERL has been awarded over 700 patents.

History

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1991 by the Mitsubishi Electric CR&D organization. In the late 1990s, MERL merged with two other laboratories that were part of Mitsubishi Electric. This consolidated all of Mitsubishi Electric’s North American research into one organization, creating the MERL that exists today. Richard C. Waters, was a founding member of MERL and has been president since 1999.

László Bélády was the head of MERL from 1991 to 1998, James D. Foley, who co-authored many of the most widely used university textbooks on computer graphics, was the president from 1998 to 1999.