News

In July of this year, the well-known search engine for academic texts, Google Scholar, published a new ranking of journals and conferences based on citation frequency for the five-year period 2020–2024. The metrics for this service include all articles that Google Scholar had in its database as of July 2025. These include both journal articles and selected conference papers. On the other hand, journals with low publication activity (less than 100 articles for the five-year period) are excluded. What is important is that several works by researchers from our faculty have achieved significant success.

An important periodical in the Engineering & Computer Science category, subcategory Computer Hardware Design, is the journal IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems. In this journal (which has a Web of Science Impact Factor of 3.1 and is therefore classified in the Q2 quartile), the article Improving the Accuracy and Hardware Efficiency of Neural Networks Using Approximate Multipliers (147 citations) – a significant part of its author team consists of members of VS Evolvable Hardware Lukáš Sekanina, Vojtěch Mrázek, and Zdeněk Vašíček. The same trio of authors is also behind another successful article, Libraries of Approximate Circuits: Automated Design and Application in CNN Accelerators, which was published in the IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems and ranked 20th in terms of citations in the relevant comparison. Finally, the names of the same authors, joined by Filip Vaverka, appear under the text "TFApprox: Towards a Fast Emulation of DNN Approximate Hardware Accelerators on GPU", which ranked 31st in terms of citations in the journal Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition.

The fact that we are not only successful in the Computer Hardware Design subcategory is evidenced, for example, by the success of the article Bayesian HMM clustering of x-vector sequences (VBx) in speaker diarization: Theory, implementation and analysis on standard tasks, co-authored by Lukáš Burget. The text ranked 6th among the most cited articles in the journal Computer Speech & Language, with 254 citations.

The complete Google Scholar rankings can be found here.

We congratulate our researchers on these achievements within the international scientific community.

As is tradition, in the week before classes begin, specifically from Thursday, September 11 to Sunday, September 14, our faculty hosts an important introductory activity for first-year students called Start@FIT. The event is organized and sponsored by the FIT VUT Student Union. It is designed to help new students take their first steps in university life, introduce them to the faculty, and offer them the opportunity to get to know their classmates, teachers, and Brno itself.

Participants can look forward to practical content covering topics such as:

• How to create a schedule and register for courses/exercises
• IS VUT
• Orientation on the faculty campus
• ... and, of course, the matriculation ceremony

More detailed information about the program and a handbook for first-year students are available HERE.

650 years ago, on August 13, 1375, Margrave John Henry of the House of Luxembourg issued the founding charter of the Carthusian monastery "Cella Trinitatis". This marked the birth of a complex that is now a historical landmark in the Královo Pole district of Brno. It is also a place where history meets state-of-the-art information technology.

The monastery was originally founded for a prior and 12 monks, so it included 12 cells for Carthusian fathers. The strict rules of coexistence of the monks of the Carthusian order, inspired by hermit ideals, were also reflected in the architectural elements. The individual cells were accessible from separate monastic gardens, towards which the windows of the cells also faced, thus preventing contact between the monks.

The monastery was repeatedly affected by war events. It was damaged during the Hussite and Czech-Hungarian wars, and suffered particularly during the Thirty Years' War. Nevertheless, it experienced a period of economic growth after the mid-18th century. Subsequently, however, it fell victim to the reforms of Joseph II, like many other church buildings in our country. The complex was turned into barracks. The military use of the complex continued until 1964, when the Czechoslovak People's Army handed it over to the Czech Technical University. Paradoxically, it was precisely the military use that helped to preserve the building and its historical value. That is why we now have before us a valuable example of a typical medieval charterhouse with subsequent Baroque modifications. The complex was given a new lease of life by renovations begun at the start of the 21st century based on a design by architect Vladislav Vrána.

Let us appreciate the places and legacies that we can pass through every day. More information about the history of the monastery and a gallery of historical images can be found HERE.