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On Thursday, September 18, the Ceremonial Academic Assembly of BUT was held in the Rector's Hall – one day before the 126th anniversary of the founding of our university. The meeting was attended by members of the academic community, university staff, representatives of university organizations, and invited guests. VUT Rector Ladislav Janíček evaluated the past academic year and focused in particular on the concept of excellence: "I am convinced that excellence must be sought above all in our people, both employees and students. They are the essence and source of excellence at universities, because it is our people who achieve excellent results, and their talent and abilities are what fill the concept of university excellence with concrete content and determine its level of competitiveness."

The rector then presented awards to prominent figures who have contributed to the development of the University of Technology. And it is in the field of awards that the Faculty of Information Technology has achieved extraordinary success this year. Three Rector's Awards for outstanding scientific and artistic achievements went to our researchers, which, together with the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC), is the best result within the university.

The award for Outstanding Conference Contribution with a Significant Impact on the Community was received by the co-authors of the article "Decentralized Planning Using Probabilistic Hyperproperties. 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'25)" Associate Professor Milan Češka, Filip Macák, and Roman Andriushchenko. This contribution was awarded the Best Student Paper prize at the AAMAS 2025 conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems. You can find out more about the article and the background to its creation in our earlier article.

The award for Result with Exceptional Media Coverage went to Professor Jiří Jaroš, who led a research team that, in collaboration with University College London (UCL), contributed to the development of a groundbreaking diagnostic technology: an optical 3D photoacoustic scanner. This technology opens up new possibilities in the non-invasive diagnosis of vascular diseases, inflammatory skin conditions, and rheumatoid arthritis. More information on Professor Jaroš's work can be found here.

The third success, Award for significant results not covered by other awards, went to the team consisting of Vladimír Veselý, Daniel Dolejška, and Matěj Grégr for their project BAZAR: Building a community around the issue of cashless dark markets. The project, which focused on obtaining non-trivial information about the operation of dark markets and sharing this information among leading experts within Czech and European security forces, received the Minister of the Interior's Award for exceptional results in the field of security research, experimental development, and innovation at the end of last year.

The Rector of BUT also awarded seven gold, ten silver, and seven commemorative medals. Silver medals were awarded to the following members of the Faculty of Information Technology: Associate Professor Dušan Kolář for outstanding achievements in the fields of education, research, development, and innovation, and Associate Professor Kamil Malinka for the Security@FIT research team for outstanding achievements that contributed to the promotion of BUT in the fields of research, development, and innovation. The BUT commemorative medal for many years of professional, dedicated work in technical and organizational support at FIT BUT was presented by the rector to Mr. Zdeněk Juříček.

At the academic community meeting, the Rector's Awards were also presented to BUT students and graduates. Anton Firc received the award for outstanding results in scientific training in the form of doctoral studies; Adam Valík received the award for outstanding results during his bachelor's studies, and David Mihola received the award for outstanding results during his master's studies. Finally, Miroslav Šafář received the Award for a BUT graduate for outstanding results in master's studies.

We congratulate all the award winners and thank them for representing our faculty!

More information about the ceremony and the award winners can be found in an article on the BUT website by Petr Kubíček.

This year, during the matriculation ceremony (September 12), the traditional Zdena Rábová Award was presented, which recognizes outstanding students from our faculty for their active involvement in science and research and for enhancing the overall prestige of FIT. This year's award goes to Sára Jobranová and Ondřej Sedláček.

Bc. Sára Jobranová has been involved in the simulation and analysis of quantum circuits in the VeriFIT group since her second year of bachelor's studies. She also wrote her bachelor's thesis on this topic, the results of which were published at the prestigious (CORE A) international conference ICCAD'24 in New Jersey, where she also presented them. The MEDUSA quantum circuit simulator she developed for a class of circuits using amplitude amplification significantly outperforms other existing techniques and is the fastest in the world. In addition, Sára actively participated in two editions of the EXCEL@FIT conference, where her contribution won three awards in 2023 (the expert public award, the expert panel award, and the industry partner award). In 2024, she represented FIT in the 8 z VUT competition, where she won. In 2024, she also represented FIT at a summer internship at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and participated in the Munich Quantum Software Forum international conference. She is currently continuing to develop techniques for the effective analysis of quantum circuits in collaboration with colleagues in Taiwan and Japan, with publication expected in 2026. It is no surprise that Sára has achieved excellent academic results throughout her studies, both at the bachelor's and master's levels.
"Of course, I greatly appreciate such achievements; it is definitely very motivating in the sense that what I do is probably useful and I probably do it quite well. At the same time, however, the most important thing for me is that I am working on something that makes sense to me and that I find interesting, and that is something that no award can give me if I didn't feel that way from the beginning. Once you find such a job and stick with it, in the worst case scenario, you will be satisfied with yourself. And in the best case scenario, others will notice it too," says Sára Jobranová, looking back on the award and her entire academic and research career to date.

Ing. Ondřej Sedláček is a talented young researcher. During his studies, he collaborates with the CESNET association on research and development in the field of cyber security. In this domain, he first researched the issue of automatic device type recognition based on network communication, on which he wrote and presented an article at the Excel@FIT faculty conference (awarded by the expert committee) and, in particular, an article at the NOMS2024 international conference (O. Sedláček and V. Bartoš, "Fusing Heterogeneous Data for Network Asset Classification – A Two-layer Approach"). In the last year, he has focused on the topic of anomaly detection in system logs. He wrote an exceptionally high-quality thesis on this topic, which evaluated existing approaches in detail using a newly created (and published) framework. Based on the results of this work, an article was written and submitted to the CNSM 2025 conference (currently under review), and other articles are in preparation. The outputs of the student's previous work have significant practical implications, as they are integrated into systems used in practice by security teams to detect and resolve cyber incidents. The current topic of anomaly detection is also expected to have practical applications through integration into a commercial product of a company involved as a partner in the research project in which the student is involved.
"In my opinion, perseverance is key to success, combined with enthusiasm for IT and what you do in it. Like most people, I came to FIT without a specific idea of what I would end up doing in IT. At the beginning of my bachelor's degree, however, I had the opportunity to work with the ANT@FIT group, and when choosing a more specific topic, I was tempted to try applied machine learning. The opportunity to focus on cybersecurity appealed to me the most," Sedláček recalls the beginnings of his research focus.

We congratulate both award winners and thank them for their excellent representation of the Faculty of Information Technology.

An article entitled An Automata-Based Framework for Verification and Bug Hunting in Quantum Circuits, to which Ondřej Lengál from the VeriFIT group made a significant contribution, was selected as a research highlight for the journal Communications of the ACM. The research highlights section usually selects several of the most interesting results from tens of thousands of articles submitted annually to ACM conferences across all areas of computer science. This is the first time that an article with a Czech affiliation has received this privilege.

The cited article introduces a new approach to the automatic verification of quantum computations using automata theory, thus creating a bridge between these two research areas (quantum computing and automata). Automata are used here for the compact representation of complex sets of quantum states. Follow-up work introduces variants of these automata that allow the representation of sets of quantum states with several dimensions of infinity (such as the number of qubits or potential amplitude values) and the verification of parametric quantum programs (e.g., that the algorithm works correctly for any number of qubits).

The article was written in collaboration with researchers from Academia Sinica in Taiwan (Republic of China), with whom the VeriFIT group has been actively collaborating for more than 15 years. More information on Ondřej Lengál's research and the challenges associated with quantum computing can be found here.