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Ing. Ján Čegiň will present his dissertation on Tuesday, November 25, 2025, at 9:30 a.m. in room G108. The thesis, entitled "Machine Learning With Human in the Loop for Textual Augmentation in the Era of Llms," was written under the supervision of doc. Jakub Šimko (ÚPGM).

Čegiň's thesis responds to rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), which have sparked interest in their potential to improve data augmentation processes, especially when compared to traditional human-based methods. Creating new training data without the need to collect additional real-world samples is key to improving artificial intelligence models. Traditionally, this process has required costly and time-consuming crowdsourcing efforts. The work explores how large language models (LLMs) can not only replace human workers, but in some cases even outperform them in generating diverse, valid, and cost-effective training data. "This work bridges human computational labor and artificial intelligence techniques, creating space for more efficient, scalable, and sustainable approaches to training smaller and more efficient models," the author summarizes the contribution of the work in the most general terms.

In his research, Cegin addresses the following main questions:

1. How effective are LLMs compared to human workers in data augmentation?
2. How transferable are human computation techniques to LLM prompting?
3. What are the costs and benefits of an LLM-based approach compared to traditional methods?

Through extensive experiments, Čegiň demonstrates that LLMs can generate more diverse and valid text data than human workers while significantly reducing costs. "We also showed that techniques inspired by human behavior (e.g., providing examples as hints) improve the performance of subsequent models. And we also found that LLM-based augmentation is particularly valuable in data-scarce environments, i.e., when few labeled examples are available."

You can read the abstract of the dissertation here.

You are cordially invited to attend the defense! The public part of it can also be viewed at this link.

This is undoubtedly an important award for Professor Jiří Jaroš – and at the same time proof of the high standard of teaching at the Faculty of Information Technology. This sums up the significance of the Award of the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports for Outstanding Educational Activity at a University, which Jaroš received from the Minister of Education Mikuláš Bek on Tuesday, November 4, 2025. The award is given to university employees for exceptional and innovative pedagogical achievements, and its aim is to highlight the importance of high-quality educational activities at universities.

Jiří Jaroš has been working for many years in the fields of highly demanding calculations, software for research and development, parallel and distributed algorithms, and numerical simulation. Since 2016, he has led the Supercomputer Technologies research group at the Faculty of Information Technology. His field of research is photoacoustic imaging and enabling its practical applications, currently especially in personalized medicine. Last year, the success of his research team was published in the form of a breakthrough diagnostic technology, the optical 3D photoacoustic scanner.

No less significant, however, is Jaroš's role in educating IT students. Jiří Jaroš is an innovative educator who continuously enriches his courses with the latest findings from research and practice. He is not afraid to introduce new methods into his teaching and motivates his students by involving them in international projects. It was he who advocated for FIT students to have access to the supercomputing technologies of the IT4Innovations center in Ostrava. Currently, his name is associated with the important Czech AI Factory project, where he is in charge of training activities (for students and commercial entities) and the creation of a related student hub directly at FIT.

How does this popular educator define his teaching style? Where does he find his inner motivation as a teacher, and what does he perceive as the current challenges of his profession? You can read about it in our press release here.

Are you interested in machine learning and AI models and want to learn from the experiences of others? As part of the nationwide AI Days, the DeepLayers 2025 conference/forum will take place in Brno. The event will last two days, so mark your calendars for November 4 and 5, 2025. The venue is the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno.

The first day will be devoted to practical workshops on training deep learning models – individual blocks will be dedicated to data processing, tutorials on working with models, building blocks of deep learning networks, and data augmentation, for example. Beginners and advanced learners are welcome, with the organizers primarily targeting bachelor's, master's, and doctoral students.

The second day will feature lectures by professionals from the fields of practice and research. You will learn, for example, about the importance of data quality in the development of software solutions in healthcare, and the extremely topical issue of quantum computing will also be addressed. The complete program of the event can be found here.

Filip Plešinger from the Artificial Intelligence and Medical Technologies Group at the Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences summarized the focus of both days: "The first day is for those who want to compare concepts, fine-tune the basics, and look at model training. On the second day, we will focus on real-life cases from business and academia and discuss how to bring it all to the world: from input data to deployment."

Participation in DeepLayers 2025 is free, but registration is required due to the limited number of participants. You can register at the link above.

The DeepLayers conference is held regularly and in recent years has become a reliable event connecting industry, research, new experiences... and, of course, those interested in machine learning.