News

Our faculty does not remain empty during the summer months. At the beginning of July (from June 30 to July 4) it was visited by 32 students of the master's study program from Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. Their program combined professional training with an introduction to the Central European region.

The professional content of the Academic Program was provided, as usual, by the Institute of Information Systems at FIT VUT, namely by Doc. Ondřej Ryšavý and Doc. Petr Matoušek; Nelson Mutua, a doctoral student at our faculty and a graduate of Strathmore University, also participated in the teaching. In addition to classes focused on topics in the field of cybersecurity (network configuration, threat detection, malware, etc.), the students also took a field trip to the Brno branch of AT&T, toured Brno with the ESN BUT student club (see photos), and went on a day trip to Prague.

Our faculty has a long tradition of cooperation with Strathmore University: it began in 2013, and since 2015, intensive cooperation has been taking place in the field of cybersecurity. We would like to add that in the second half of August, the traditional BISSIT (Brno International Summer School in Information Technology) event will continue the activities of foreign students at our faculty. Selected students (this time from the bachelor's program) from Kenya will also participate again.

From June 9 to August 1, 2025, the Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology will serve as the venue for the gathering of dozens of leading global experts in the field of speech and language technologies. The 32nd edition of the prestigious Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (JSALT) is organized by Johns Hopkins University (Maryland, USA), this year in cooperation with partners of the European ESPERANTO project. This edition is co-organized by FIT BUT and the company Phonexia, with the support of OP JAK (Operational Programme Johannes Amos Comenius) and under the patronage of the City of Brno and the South Moravian Region. For our faculty, this is a major recognition, closely related to the long-term and internationally highly successful work of the BUT Speech@FIT research group.

The workshop itself will be preceded by a summer school from June 9 to June 20, offering lectures on topics related to speech technologies and natural language processing filled with practical sessions and hand-on. The lectures will be also available to the broader public interested in the field as video-stream on YouTube. The content of the summer school will be presented by the senior participants of the workshop and invited experts.

The six-week research workshop itself (June 23 – August 1) will host more than 100 researchers from around the world, including prominent figures such as Ricard Marxer (University of Toulon), Ramani Duraiswami (University of Maryland), Samuele Cornell (Carnegie Mellon University), Yannick Estève (Laboratoire d'Informatique d'Avignon) and Fethi Bougares (Elyadata). Participants are divided into four teams, each focusing on a selected research topic. Two of the teams are led by researchers from FIT BUT: Assoc. Prof. Lukáš Burget and Dr. Santosh Kesiraju. For this year’s edition, the following core topics have been selected by community and sponsors:

• Play your Part: Towards LLM role-playing agents that stick to their role
• Advancing Expert-Level Reasoning and Understanding in Large Audio Language Models
• End to End Multi-Channel Multi-Talker ASR, EMMA
• TTS4ALL: TTS in Low Resource Scenarios – Data Management, Methodology, Models, Evaluation

The workshop’s goal is not only to push the boundaries of research once again, but also to foster international scientific collaboration and involve students at all levels. Each team includes senior researchers, PhD students, and undergraduate students, providing an exceptional opportunity for expert mentoring. A key criterion for workshop outcomes is also the openness of results, particularly in terms of open-source contributions.

The workshop is named after Bedřich/Frederick Jelinek (1932–2010), a Czech-American scientist from Kladno and a pioneer in speech recognition research, who for many years led the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University. It is therefore symbolic that this event bearing his name will be held at FIT BUT, a faculty that – thanks to the contributions of figures such as Hynek Heřmanský, Jan Černocký, and Lukáš Burget – has become one of the world's leading centers in AI and machine learning for speech data mining.

Another extraordinary success has been achieved in recent days by the university spin-off DynaNIC Semiconductors from Brno University of Technology, which has its roots in the Faculty of Information Technology. The company was successful in this year's Venture Club Disrupt Awards competition, organized under the auspices of Startup Disrupt and Venture Club at Prague Castle. Every year, the event seeks out top start-ups with growth potential and global technological ambitions. This year, 45 projects entered the competition, with 5 projects selected for the final. Representatives of DynaNIC presented their project to investors at a gala evening held at Prague Castle – and ultimately won first place and with it an investment of up to €3 million. Among other things, the organizers highlighted the fact that DynaNIC is proof that even in Central Europe, a groundbreaking project with global potential in the field of hardware can emerge.

DynaNIC is a technology spin-off focused on the development of an advanced network solution based on the use of FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) technology. It significantly speeds up network traffic processing by transferring demanding network operations from the processor to programmable network cards with data flow speeds of up to 400 Gb/s. It is thus a response to the current challenges associated with the rapid development of AI and the increase in the volume of data transmitted, as confirmed by Jan Kořenek from the Accelerated Network Technologies Research Group: "One chip programmed by us is capable of replacing tens to hundreds of computers with its computing capacity. Instead of a large number of computers, all you need is one with an acceleration card on which the programmed FPGA chip is located. This also significantly reduces energy consumption." Read more about DynaNIC's key product in our previous article.

The experts presented their network acceleration card in May 2024, and in November of the same year, they received an investment of CZK 14 million from the Tensor Ventures fund and other angel investors. This was followed by interest from major technology players, including Microsoft. The latest chapter in this highly successful story is the current award in the Disrupt Awards competition. DynaNIC is thus the flagship application of research conducted at FIT VUT.