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At the beginning of September, FIT VUT will host a two-day workshop/seminar on "Patents – what inventors should know," led by renowned researcher and mentor Shmuel Ur. The event will take place on Tuesday, September 2, and Wednesday, September 3, 2025, at the faculty premises and will also be available to watch online via live stream. The workshop is part of the European project VASSAL, in which our faculty and experts from the VeriFIT research group are the main partners.

Shmuel Ur holds more than 230 US patents and the title of IBM Master Inventor. He has a fifteen-year career at IBM Research and a track record of successful collaborations with leading technology companies and startups (including the investment company Intellectual Ventures). In his courses, Shmuel combines stories from his own practice with specific examples and provides participants with practical recommendations. Course participants will gain an overview of how to avoid the most common mistakes in protecting intellectual property, how to use patents not only as legal protection but also as an economic tool, and why „problems are more important than solutions“.

The program will be divided into two approximately two-hour blocks each day, with a lunch break and a final discussion. In addition, in-person participants will have the opportunity to consult with the lecturer individually about their own ideas, research projects, or patent strategies. The event is completely free for participants. Registration for the course is non-binding and serves to better organize capacity.

More information about the event can be found here.

The JSALT 2025 international research workshop, organized by the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, concluded with a gala reception at the BUT Rector's Office on Friday, August 1. The event, which this year attracted more than 100 top researchers in the field of speech and language technologies from 22 countries, took place at the Faculty of Information Technology BUT over a period of six weeks (preceded by a summer school). The core of the program was the scientific work of four research teams, which presented their findings in the final days of the workshop. A unifying theme across the teams was machine learning applied to human speech. The first team focused on improving the ability of large language models to consistently adhere to assigned roles (doctor, counselor, etc.), demonstrating, for example, the importance of persona-based prompting and developing a framework for sound synthesis to generate spoken dialogue using LLM. The outputs of the second team, which focused on language models working with sound, included new audio datasets covering a range of areas to support preliminary model training and a new methodology to assess answer correctness. The third team, working on simplifying and streamlining speech recognition in complex scenarios, presented e.g. an improved speaker diarization conditioned speech transcription. The last team, for example, came up with a new toolkit for evaluating text-to-speech (TTS) conversion for low-resource languages (e.g., Bengali, Kurdish, or Sarawak Malay) and offered new training and testing data for these types of languages.

Although we are a small country, speech and language technologies rank us among the most important global centers, alongside the United States and China. The Czech Republic, and specifically Brno, has made an indisputable mark in this field of artificial intelligence thanks to the Speech@FIT research group and names such as Hynek Heřmanský, Jan Černocký, and Lukáš Burget. This is one of the reasons why we were able to welcome personalities such as Ricard Marxer (University of Toulon), Ramani Duraiswami (University of Maryland), Samuele Cornell (Carnegie Mellon University), Yannick Estève (Laboratoire d'Informatique d'Avignon), Fethi Bougares (Elyadata), and the main organizer of the event, Sanjeev Khudanpur (Johns Hopkins University). In fact, the workshop offered seven plenary lectures by leading experts, which were also aimed at a wider audience.

The aim of this prestigious event is, of course, to push the boundaries of research. However, perhaps an even more significant outcome of JSALT can be seen in its support for international scientific cooperation and the establishment of new interpersonal contacts (and thus contacts between institutions). Many of today's technologies have their roots in research and collaborations that began at JSALT. One example is the automatic translation system found in Google Translate. „Brno is a recognized center of European research in the field of speech and language artificial intelligence, but from mid-June to early August, this position was tangible, visible, and audible – the concentration of so many smart colleagues, talented doctoral and master's students, invited speakers, important visitors from universities and industry, presentations, brainstorming sessions, daily meetings, and the exchange of ideas made JSALT a very intense experience. We are very pleased that our participants took home not only technical know-how, contacts with colleagues, a foundation for further scientific work, articles, software, and data, but also that they became attached to FIT VUT and Brno as suitable places for work and entertainment. Brno is magnetic in the best sense of the word, and I think we will see many of them here again,“ says Jan „Honza“ Černocký, evaluating this year's JSALT.

All of the above points can be considered fulfilled this year, with a significant contribution from FIT BUT and its "speech data miners". We would like to thank the organizers, presenters, and participants for their work and enthusiasm!

You can find a photo gallery from the final days of the workshop HERE (photos: Martin Horný).

A major international research workshop, JSALT 2025, organized by Johns Hopkins University (Maryland, USA), is taking place at the Faculty of Information Technology at BUT and will run until the end of July. Thanks to this event, around one hundred leading global researchers in language and speech technologies have come to Brno. Four teams are working for six weeks on current research topics related, for example, to large language models or speech processing under challenging conditions. The workshop program is further enriched by plenary lectures delivered by prominent experts from both industry and academia. An especially interesting talk is expected on Tuesday, July 15, when Loïc Barrault from Meta AI in France will give a presentation.

Loïc Barrault will speak at 11:00 at our faculty with his lecture titled Large Concept Model: beyond token-based Large Language Models. In this talk, he will explore (certainly also socially somewhat provocative) questions such as whether large AI models can acquire key characteristics of human intelligence, such as reasoning, planning, hierarchical, or multilingual information processing. The very topic invites a wider audience — you can either attend in person in room E112 at FIT BUT or follow the live stream on the JSALT YouTube channel.

It should be added that Loïc Barrault is a renowned researcher in the field of machine translation, who has worked at universities in Le Mans and Sheffield, among others. Today, he is recognized as one of the pioneers in integrating language, speech, and visual information, significantly contributing to the development of adaptive models over the long term.

You can find more information about the workshop, which can also be seen as a recognition of the long-standing work of the Brno-based BUT Speech@FIT research group and its head, Professor Jan Černocký, in the press release HERE.