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Czech scientists, including researchers from the Faculty of Information Technology, are developing a voice bot which should be activated in case emergency lines become extremely overloaded. Voice bots should be able to increase capacities in case of a huge number of telephone calls to emergency control centres and thus may prove beneficial during serious natural disasters. The voice bot is developed by a team of 38 experts from various institutions: FIT BUT, IT4Innovations, Faculty of Safety Engineering, VSB-TUO and three companies - Phonexia, BornDigital and SpeechTech which focus on text analysis and speech recognition and synthesis. The first prototype able to manage telephone calls regarding fire will be ready during the holidays. The project team will then work on its usability for other types of emergencies. The project should be finished in the second half of 2022. More information to be found in the press release of the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Centre which is a project coordinator together with VSB-TUO.

Three best Bachelor's theses in the field of IT submitted between February 2020 and February 2021 won the Czechitas Thesis Award. The award for the best IT thesis written by a woman was presented to Kristýna Zaklová of FIT for her design and creation of a web-based search engine "Komu patřím" (Who do I belong to) that allows users to search for records of registered pets. It can make the job easier especially for animal control, veterinarians, police and other people who need to identify a pet and its owner (we informed about it on the FIT website earlier this year). The committee evaluated the uniqueness of the idea, the quality of the thesis, its use in practice and evolution of the project based on mentoring which all participants underwent.

Archaeogenetics. This is sometimes called ancestral reconstruction - a technique through which scientists investigate traces of the past, much like archaeologists. However, biologists do not look for them at excavation sites, but in computers. They are examining gene sequences and looking for organisms that no longer exist today. The new unique FireProt-ASR tool, developed by Miloš Musil from the Faculty of Information Technology of BUT, will fundamentally help researchers with finding millions-of-years-old proteins from which the current ones have evolved. You can find more information in the article.