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A team from the Faculty of Information Technology at the BUT, led by Martin Karafiát, is involved in a unique dialect mapping project. In cooperation with the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Palacký University in Olomouc, they are creating a website where you can select a region of the Czech Republic and listen to the dialects characteristic of a given place. In addition, the project team is categorising the recordings, which go back to the 1950s, according to various criteria, such as the themes of the narratives.


Researchers from the Dialectology Department of the Institute of Czech Language of the Czech Academy of Sciences have long been trying to map and preserve the various dialects across the Czech Republic. In 2023, they have enlisted the help of experts from the Speech@FIT group, who are currently working on creating a system that would be able to identify the dialect. And also create an automatic transcription of the recordings. "Our speech group has had great success in the areas of language identification, speaker identification and speech transcription. So the primary idea is to bring these areas together, work with unique data and create a system that will be able to automatically transcribe the audio data, which will be a huge help to researchers at the Academy of Sciences. Especially because the data is specific and the classic transcribers from Google or Microsoft fail," explains Martin Karafiát from FIT BUT.


You can read more about this project in our article here.

Brushes, paints, palette, canvas - all these are usually considered basic necessities for artistic expression. Designed for all art lovers, regardless of age, the Pollock Artify app offers the opportunity to unleash your creativity with a tool that is always at hand - your mobile phone. Its movements are transformed into brush movements on the canvas in the style of American abstract painter Jackson Pollock.  It was created by four students of the Faculty of Information Technology, Peter Zdravecký, Slavomír Svorada, Jakub Zaukolec and Jozef Čásar. 

The idea to connect the world of aesthetics and technology came from a reflection on human values. "In addition to the basic needs in life, humans need to perceive aesthetic values, which include art. Pollock Artify allows you to create your own art and share it with others," explains Peter Zdravecký, one of the members of the implementation team. 


More about the Pollock Artify app here.

Spreading alarm messages or disclosing confidential company or bank data. Artificial intelligence is developing rapidly and almost anyone can create deepfake voice recordings at home and in high quality. Neither humans nor biometric systems can reliably distinguish artificial speech from real speech. Researchers from FIT BUT together with commercial system developers now want to design more reliable testing and more accurate detection of deepfakes. They are responding to a call from the Ministry of the Interior.

Anton Firc from FIT BUT first started to address the issue of deepfakes in his master's thesis, in which he investigated the resistance of voice biometrics to deepfakes. The same issue was then followed up by Daniel Prudky's research, which sent voice messages to 31 respondents and investigated their ability to detect deepfakes in ordinary conversation. "People were told a cover story about the user-friendliness of the voicemails being tested. He included one deepfake recording in the test conversations and monitored the respondents' reactions. The results showed that none of them experienced a fraudulent deepfake message," Firc explains.

However, in the same experiment, when respondents were told that one of the voicemails was a fake, they were able to identify it with almost 80% accuracy. "But the research showed that although a deepfake recording is easily identifiable among real ones, no one can detect it in a normal conversation," Firc adds. Part of the reason for this, he says, is that the interviewer didn't expect it in the context, and that's what the creators of deepfake recordings can exploit in reality.


Complete article here.