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New technology developed at the Faculty of Information Technology of the Brno University of Technology will help pilots train air combat tactics. They will face artificial intelligence in simulated aerial combat. The AIDA project was conceived in co-operation between researchers and students from FIT BUT and VR Group, a.s. For more information, read the article. 

For example, students will be able to try out user interface designs or experiment with on-board systems directly on a car available at the faculty. The partner company ŠKODA AUTO donated an Octavia IV. "It will now be used in specialised courses as well as in courses and seminars falling under the Cyberphysical Systems specialisation. Matěj Mitaš, a member of our team, who has unfortunately left us recently, deserves much of the credit for that, but also thanks to his efforts, the car will now be a part of teaching at the faculty," said Peter Chudý. The Aeroworks research group, which he leads, has been co-operating with the automobile plant for a long time - together they have developed, for example, a unique system enabling the company's technical development staff to easily design various user interfaces (for more information, see the earlier press release).

The new Covid without Barriers web application aims to facilitate vaccination and testing for persons with reduced mobility. The application is the brainchild of two FIT students - Josef Kolář and Peter Uhrín. The app, which was originally developed as a part of the WAP course, allows users to find wheelchair-accessible vaccination and testing sites on an interactive map.

Covid without Barriers is the only application that processes this information. "We need to give the vaccine to as many people as possible. There are a number of apps dealing with pandemic-related data, but when we were researching them, we noticed that none of them made it possible for us to directly display wheel-chair accessible sites," says Josef Kolář, describing how the idea came about.

The app, whose features and name the students discussed with the community of its potential users, accesses publicly available data through an API. The map shows wheelchair-accessible testing and vaccination sites at specific locations, and for each of these sites, a detail can be viewed that includes its address, services provided and references to detailed information in government-run applications. "It is also possible to search for sites based on the user's geographical location or address. The application also provides filters for individual site categories, so it is possible to display only vaccination or testing sites," explains Peter Uhrín.

According to him, the most challenging part was to create a simple and accessible user interface; it also took some time to test and optimise the app for mobile devices. The app is now fully deployed and is being used by dozens of people.