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The twelfth year of the competition for the best diploma thesis in the field of IT, in which nearly 1,300 students from 13 Czech and Slovak universities took part, has its winners. They were selected by an expert jury composed of 19 academics and IT business professionals on Wednesday, 8 December. Patrik Goldschmidt from FIT, who also won the People's Choice Award, ranked second.

Being with people who give you their undivided attention. For the average person, this is basically an everyday situation. For people suffering from social phobia, this is a very stressful moment. Thanks to the Ekhi project which is being worked on by physicians from the University Hospital Brno and experts from the Masaryk University in Brno in co-operation with the team led by Tomáš Švec from the Faculty of Information Technology of the Brno University of Technology, patients suffering from various mental disorders will soon be able to train various situations or revisit stressful experiences in the safety of virtual reality. They will be accompanied by a therapist who will be able to control the situation and adjust the patients' stress level.

Did you know that when a violoncello player travels with the instrument, they must buy the instrument its own flight ticket? That gets expensive and not even an extra fee may be enough to alleviate the fear of an instrument which is sometimes worth hundreds of thousands of Czech crowns getting damaged. Last spring, a new product arrived to the Czech market which can easily fit in a violin case. Many fans of classical music would think it too bold and perhaps doomed to failure, but the 3D printed violoncello made by a BUT graduate raised over a million Czech crowns in a public fundraiser campaign and also made an appearance at the stage of Brno Philharmonic.

A new tool which is available for nearly all major web browsers was developed by Libor Polčák and FIT BUT students. The Free Software Foundation international non-profit organisation has decided to back their results. The extension named JShelter will help users erase the footprints left on the Internet by their browsers and protect their data. 

Everybody who has ever been to Brno by car during a working week probably knows that finding a parking space is about as likely as winning a lottery. This is especially true if the driver must rely on parking spaces available to everybody and not just to residents. In the future, drivers could be spared having to cruise around hoping somebody decides to leave in part thanks to a technology developed by a FIT BUT student, Kateřina Rafajová. She utilised both radars and GPS mounted in cars to find free parking spaces in the area.

A deformed or completely missing part of the skull is not only a health threatening condition but also an aesthetic problem. Fortunately, modern medicine can replace these parts and allow people to live their lives to the fullest. In order for the skull implants to be as accurate as possible and to fit together like puzzle pieces, a team from the Faculty of Information Technology at BUT focused on this issue.

Although the office of Dana Hliněná is located at the FEEC Department of Mathematics, she currently gives lectures to students of FIT as her department is responsible for teaching mathematics at FIT. The popular teacher is already looking forward to live classes and also to devoting more time to her favourite field of fuzzy logic.

Is it possible for an attacker to create an artificial voice and use it to call bank or operator lines and impersonate customers or collect sensitive information? Anton Firc from the Faculty of Information Technology of the Brno University of Technology has decided to find out. …

Siri, Alexa, Google - we talk to them all today. But who breathed life into them? Speech recognition has gradually spread from IT labs to smart homes and has become a common part of everyday life. Getting information from audio recordings is becoming increasingly important. For the first time in its history, the Czech Republic will host the international conference Interspeech, which will take place in Brno from August 30 to September 3, 2021. Hundreds of world experts will arrive in the Moravian metropolis. More than 1400 will join the event online. Specialists will present news from the field, such as how to start using machine learning with a minimum of training data, or whether coronavirus infection can be recognized from the cough.

Turning a standard water heater into a smart one using an affordable device and reducing consumption by up to a third. That is what Adam Grünwald of the Faculty of Information Technology of BUT managed to do in his Bachelor's thesis. Furthermore, his invention can connect to the Google Calendar which for example allows the water heater to know when its owner is leaving for a vacation. Grünwald plans to further improve the device and even considers placing it on the market.

A traffic accident, an athlete's collapse or a smoke bomb - all of these need to be addressed as soon as possible to prevent injury or further damage. However, it is sometimes not possible for human beings to identify exactly where the problem originated in the ensuing confusion and to direct rescuers to the right place. The new "anomaly detection system" was created by computer science students and offered to police officers, who could use it to quickly and automatically detect a problem and put it on a map.

Twenty-three-year-old Jana Gregorová, like her classmates, did not get to see her school for much of the past academic year. Perhaps she feels even more strongly about the closed shooting ranges, which she has been visiting for about two years, as she says, to relax. The only thing that distracts her on the range are the not very functional cameras displaying the target. Therefore, she decided to program her own system, which also continuously calculates her score.

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.

Miloš Musil from the Department of Information Systems at FIT created a new web application that helps scientists with ancestral reconstruction. He developed the unique tool in collaboration with scientists from the International Clinical Research Centre of St. Anne's University Hospital and researchers from the Loschmidt Laboratories at Masaryk University. There, they use the application to study molecular evolution and search for ancient proteins that no longer exist today. These can help, for example, in pharmacology, medicine or biotechnology. 

Early detection of a cyber-attack on Internet of Things (IoT) networks can literally save you from unforeseeable consequences, be they an invasion of your privacy or disruption of the energy grid. Autonomous devices cannot be protected by antivirus programs, so another solution is needed. Researchers from the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology teamed up with experts from Flowmon Networks and partners from South Korea to develop tools that enable IoT monitoring and diagnostics.

Over five dozen papers were presented in the final selection of the Excel@FIT student conference, which was held on Thursday by the Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology for the seventh time. FIT students presented their papers selected for the final round by a committee of experts from both the academic and commercial sectors. The faculty distributed CZK 160,000 among the best contenders.

Every day, we rely on the flawless functioning of dozens, if not hundreds, of applications and programs running on our computers, be they web browsers, information systems, communications software, or a multitude of hidden programs running in the background. We have come to expect applications not only not to crash suddenly, but also to respond very quickly to our commands. However, every user has experienced a situation where a new update to an important app caused it to slow down noticeably or even freeze up completely. This is exactly what Jiří Pavela, a doctoral student from the Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology, who is also one of the awardees in the Brno Ph.D. Talent competition, wants to prevent.

It has been more than 48 years since humans last walked on the surface of the Moon. A potential return to the Moon has recently become a frequently discussed topic and it attracted the attention of Jakub Karpíšek, a FIT student, who decided to research this area as part of his Bachelor's thesis. The jurors of the 8 of BUT were fascinated by his lunar landing simulation and awarded him a second place in the competition.

Imagine yourself pulling out your phone to take a picture of a beautiful view. You point the camera towards the landscape and your device tells you, in augmented reality, the names of surrounding hills, their elevation, tourist paths in the area and can even show you the terrain contours. The new software tool created by researchers of the CPhoto@FIT BUT group is able to recognise the photographer's location and the photographed object and knows what the surrounding area looks like under different weather conditions. This allows you to edit the picture at home, e.g. make it sharper or adjust the shadows. On top of that, it can take you back to the place where the picture was taken using virtual reality.

Autonomous cars and receptionists, applications for the visually impaired, voice recognition, virtual power stations or developing a cure for Covid - all this could be achieved by employing artificial intelligence. Brno's experts on artificial intelligence set themselves a goal to achieve its greater practical use and, on Thursday, introduced a common platform - Brno.ai. It was created not only by professionals from FIT BUT and Masaryk University, but also by representatives of IT companies, the South Moravian Region and the City of Brno as well as the JIC innovation agency.

Spanish researcher Alicia Lozano-Diez still has several days left of her research stay at the Faculty of Information Technology. At the end of January, after twenty months of hard work, she will finish her robust speaker recognition research on which she has been working within the scope of the prestigious European grant Marie Curie H2020 intended for young and talented researchers.

It was a close call, but team of researchers from the KNOT@FIT group - Martin Fajčík, Martin Dočekal, Karel Ondřej and Pavel Smrž - managed to come in third at the EfficientQA competition held as part of the NeurIPS 2020 conference. Their system called BUT R2-D2 succeeded alongside such big names as Facebook or Microsoft and triumphed in the "machine competition" where it also competed against humans in a trivia quiz.