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As part of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 project, the multinational auditing company has been compiling a ranking for 26 years with the aim of identifying and recognizing fast-growing innovative technology companies from the wider Central European region. These are entities that use or create cutting-edge technologies in a unique way and are changing the way business is done and the entire business and technological environment.

For several years now, Czech companies have been demonstrating the impressive growth of the country's technology sector through their rankings. They maintain a leading position in the region, although Poland in particular has become a major competitor in recent years. The success of domestic companies is not limited to the main Fast 50 category, i.e., the list of the fastest-growing established companies (the Czech Republic has 14 representatives in the top 50 this year, 5 of which are in the top 10; the ranking was dominated by the domestic company Oddin.gg, which offers one of the world's most advanced platforms for predicting the results of e-sports matches and tournaments using machine learning). The Czech republic had two representatives in the top 10 of the Companies to Watch category, which focuses on finding projects with high potential for further growth. One of them, DynaNIC Semiconductors, has close ties to the Faculty of Information Technology.

DynaNIC took fifth place in the Companies to Watch category. Pavol Korček accepted the award on behalf of the company and commented on the success as proof that large technology projects today are not limited to traditional geographical locations: "For us, this is confirmation that even advanced chip technologies can be developed in Central Europe, in Brno."

DynaNIC is a university spin-off focused on the development of advanced network solutions based on the use of FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) technologies. It significantly speeds up network traffic processing by transferring demanding network operations from the processor to programmable network cards with a data flow rate of up to 400 Gb/s. It is thus a response to current challenges related to the rapid development of AI and the increase in the volume of transmitted data. Last year and this year, the company has seen repeated interest from investors, won the prestigious Disrupt Awards competition, and advanced to the finals of the ECSO European Cybersecurity STARtup Award.

The fourth edition attracted more than 200 students to VIDA!

On Friday, November 14, the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology, together with the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University, organized another edition of the AI4Talents event, which is part of the Days of AI festival. More than 200 high school students arrived at the VIDA! science center in Brno, eager to try their hand at working with artificial intelligence and get a glimpse into the world of academic and corporate research.

The program was opened by Prof. Honza Černocký (Speech@FIT) with a lecture on the truths and myths of AI and the role of mathematics and critical thinking. Doc. Kamil Malinka (Security@FIT) followed with a lecture on the use of AI in cybersecurity. At the same time, lectures by FI MUNI focused on the ecosystems of the future and the use of AI in healthcare.

In the afternoon, students had the opportunity to try out practical workshops – from creating a website with the help of AI, to recognizing a speaker by their voice, to analyzing media using machine learning. The program also included lectures on the use of AI in orbit and working with open-source models.

Visitors could also get a glimpse into the work of the Security@FIT and NES@FIT research groups, which presented technologies for detecting deepfakes and cracking passwords using the Fitcrack tool.

We would like to thank all the partners who participated in the program, especially AT&T, Phonexia, Newsmatics, Red Hat, SAP, Zaitra, Kyndryl, NXP, and VIDA! Science Center, for their expert support and inspiring demonstrations. More information about the event and photos from the event can be found here.

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.