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On Sunday, November 16, 2025, the Josef, Marie, and Zdeňka Hlávka Foundation awarded the Josef Hlávka Prize. This prize is awarded annually to talented students under the age of 33 who have demonstrated exceptional abilities and creative thinking in their field. This year, the award goes to our faculty – it was personally accepted by Filip Macák from the Department of Intelligent Systems.

Doctoral student Filip Macák has recently been particularly successful with his research work. In May of this year, at the AAMAS 2025 conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems in Detroit, USA, he received the Best Student Paper award for his article "Decentralized Planning Using Probabilistic Hyperproperties" (both articles were co-authored by Roman Andriushchenko, under the supervision of Associate Professor Milan Češka). In September, he received the Rector's Award for an exceptional conference contribution with a significant impact on the community for the same achievement.

Macák specializes in the field of formal verification in probabilistic models working within sequential decision-making with uncertainty. These are used, for example, in the fields of economics, medicine, and today especially in the development of AI (reinforcement learning). He is interested in, for example, the reliability and explainability of AI agents, which raise questions about the appropriateness of the agent's chosen strategies, or, in layman's terms, whether AI agents are doing what is appropriate and desirable in a given situation. Macák then deals with the formal, mathematical verification of systems with the aim of increasing their accountability and credibility – this is one of the major challenges in connection with the current massive development of artificial intelligence. You can find out more about his professional focus and perception of various awards for his work in the press release here.

We wish Filip Macák many more successes and thank him for his excellent representation of FIT BUT.

A new project is coming to the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology, bringing with it significant financial support for the research team. Vojtěch Mrázek from the Department of Computer Systems and his team have received support from the Czech Science Foundation in the form of a GA ČR Junior Star grant. This is an extraordinary achievement, as evidenced by the demanding selection process, in which only three teams from the field of technical sciences across the entire country were successful, and only one of them comes from BUT. Thanks to the five-year duration with the possibility of drawing up to CZK 25 million and without the need for additional funding from the parent institution, the researchers have the opportunity to become scientifically independent, establish or support a research team, and bring new research topics to Czech science.

Vojtěch Mrázek himself confirms this: "I really appreciate this project because it allows me to build a team, and without a team, it's impossible today given the complexity of the technology. This is not a job for one person." The research team is therefore professionally complemented by Dr. Marcela Zachariášová and Ing. Martin Hurta.

The winning project, "EvoML-EDA: Synergy of Evolutionary Algorithms and Advanced Machine Learning Algorithms for Digital Circuit Design," aims to combine the advantages of evolutionary electronic circuit design and advanced machine learning methods to improve chip design. Mrázek and his colleagues use evolutionary algorithms that work on the principle of gradual unplanned changes leading to improved functionality to design and optimize circuits. The disadvantage of these algorithms is that they are relatively time-consuming, but the reward is transformations that, when combined with machine learning algorithms, lead to their improvement. The influence of evolutionary algorithms and AI algorithms is mutual – evolutionary design algorithms also improve through interaction. The result is, for example, increased calculation efficiency and a related reduction in the energy consumption of computational operations. Mrázek points out that FIT VUT and the Evolvable Hardware research group are among the top ten in Europe in the field of Electronic Design Automation, as evidenced by the Computer Science Ranking database and cooperation with foreign partners.

More information about Vojtěch Mrázek's project and the circumstances of his grant award can be found in the press release here.

The exchange of information between academia and industry is also supported by the Industry Council at the Faculty of Information Technology. The advisory working group meets at least once a year with the participation of nearly two dozen representatives of the faculty's corporate partners. The most recent meeting took place on Thursday, October 30, 2025, shortly before the start of the important Žijeme IT conference at the FIT.

The opening remarks of the meeting between faculty management and representatives of major IT companies were given by the Vice-Dean for Marketing and External Relations, Vítězslav Beran, who emphasized the importance of such meetings. The essence of the partnership with the faculty lies in preparing students for the job market in the best possible way. The dean of the faculty, Petr Hanáček, followed up with a presentation of FIT's strategic goals, highlighting two key projects: the development of supercomputing technologies and the Czech AI Factory consortium, in which FIT experts play a key role; and a fresh major impetus in the form of quantum informatics and the Quantum Innovation Center association, which can be considered a key project for the future of the Czech Republic in the field of quantum computers and post-quantum cryptography, and whose members also include BUT.

The most significant part of the Industry Council meeting was taken up by a discussion in which representatives of corporate partners participated. Kamila Zahradníčková, CEO of the successful startup Lakmoos, highlighted the support for startups and the transformation of communication with the university environment in general over the last 10 years. The quality and professional preparedness of FIT graduates was praised by the CEO of Phonexia, Ms. Markéta Lőrinczy, who particularly appreciated the close cooperation with faculty "speech therapists" led by Professor Jan Černocký. An interesting debate followed the contribution of Vojtěch Filip from Tescan Group, who highlighted semiconductors as an important area of preparation for future graduates. This was followed by a discussion on motivating students to take an interest in hardware topics in general. Of course, more topics were discussed, as evidenced by our press release here.

We would like to thank all participants of the meeting and look forward to future ones.