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For anyone considering studying IT and would like to know more about how things work at our faculty, we are preparing our traditional open house. Come and ask us anything you want to know about studying and life at FIT.

When? Wednesday, October 22. We start at 12:00. Our students will guide you through everything. In the introductory lecture, you will find out why it makes sense to study information technology and why you should choose FIT. You will learn practical information about the admission process, and at the end, there will be time for your questions.

The program will also include guided tours of the campus, laboratories, and other locations. You can look forward to mobile robots, demonstrations of rendering and 3D printing, an introduction to a project involving the processing of documents and photographs using artificial intelligence, and a tour of our IT museum. And because a major added value of studying at our faculty is the high level of interest that companies have in our graduates, we will also offer you the opportunity to meet potential future employers – the faculty's corporate partners.

And let's not forget: you will have the chance to test your IQ. And if you achieve a good result... we will waive the entrance exam.

Detailed information about the open house at FIT can be found here. We look forward to seeing you.

Astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said: "We have created a global civilization whose most important elements are deeply dependent on science and technology. At the same time, we have arranged it so that almost no one understands science and technology. That is a recipe for disaster." Popularizing science is one way of trying to prevent this from happening. Since 2015, the Science and Technology Club, which operates at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Brno University of Technology, has been contributing to this effort.

This year, for the eleventh year in a row, it is preparing a rich program of popularization lectures for the public. There have been more than 100 lectures in total, including presentations by Prof. Petr Kulhánek (Milestones in Cosmology), Daniel Stach (Science Not Only for Scientists – Popularization of Science on Czech Television), and Tomáš Přibyl (War Through the Eyes of Spy Satellites).

This year, the lecture series will again feature researchers from our faculty. On Tuesday, October 14, at 6:00 p.m., Kamil Malinka will give a lecture on the security implications of deepfakes. Subsequently, on November 4, again on Tuesday at 6:00 p.m., Lukáš Sekanina will talk about the "convergence of chips and AI" (lecture: Genetic Programming and Automated Hardware for AI).

The lectures will take place at FSI VUT (Technická 2), and attendance is free. Enthusiasts, scientists, students, and professionals in the natural sciences and technical fields are invited to attend.

We would like to invite you to the public defense of the dissertation of Ing. Anton Firc, which will take place on Tuesday, October 21, 2025, at 3:00 p.m. in room C209. The dissertation was written under the supervision of doc. Kamil Malinka.

Anton Firc is a member of the Security@FIT research group and, among other things, a recipient of the Joseph Fourier Award. His research focuses on the security implications of voice deepfakes. He has been involved in cybersecurity since his master's studies, when he was attracted to the topic of a thesis written by Kamil Malinka: "I was looking for more detailed information on deepfakes, and I was very interested in the possibilities of technology that, figuratively speaking, can create another person. Around 2020, it was an unexplored topic. Everything we did was new in a way. The transition to a doctorate was then just a natural step." The situation has changed significantly since then, and today our researchers are often confronted with demands to popularize the topic, as well as requests for tools and specific professional cooperation, as Firc admits in an interview from this summer.

Firc's dissertation is based on the premise that audio deepfakes pose a threat to computer security from the outset because they increase the effectiveness of social engineering attacks and allow speaker recognition systems to be circumvented. Previous research has focused mainly on detection, but it lacked a comprehensive security framework based on an understanding of the attacker, their goals, and their methods, so it was unclear how detection should work and how to build defenses against voice deepfakes accordingly. Anton Firc's work focuses precisely on how to evaluate voice deepfakes in a structured way from a cybersecurity perspective and, based on that, propose effective defenses. A key step is understanding the attacker model, which is a prerequisite for the subsequent development and evaluation of protection methods. Among other things, the work includes a proposal for a framework for evaluating detection methods that addresses known problems with deepfake detection, such as poor generalization and limited comparability. The analysis shows that people are unable to reliably recognize deepfakes in real attacks. Therefore, an expanded model of protection against deepfake threats is needed, one that includes multiple measures active at different stages of the deepfake life cycle and offers structured protection. The author also addresses the broader context of voice deepfakes, such as public awareness as a proactive defense strategy.

You can read the abstract of the dissertation here.

You are cordially invited to attend the defense!