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I live, you live, We Live IT - this year for the sixth time at the FIT and again live and in style after the COVID break

The last Friday in November belonged to all those whose hearts beat to the rhythm of ones and zeros at the Faculty of Information Technology. It is true that a certain propensity for the world of information technology is to be expected at our university, but the sixth year of the interactive conference "We Live IT" brought together graduates, students and experts from the world of work and offered everyone an inspiring convergence of the academic and corporate worlds in a packed programme. Sixteen lectures, 2 panel discussions with participation by 15 IT experts, almost 150 students, 32 panellists from the ranks of IT experts, 45 company representatives and countless lively discussions and shared experiences.

"At the FIT, we are aware that academia and industry cannot function well without each other.  We organise the We Live IT conference together with partners of the FIT with the aim of presenting practical professional topics in IT to our students. Cooperation with the IT industry is very important for our faculty, and that is why we have been building a portfolio of partners over the long term, to ensure that the offer of specialisations is broad and of a high professional level. We want to introduce students to our partners, discuss student projects and summer internships and participate in debates with representatives of IT companies and our graduates", says Vítězslav Beran, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology, explaining the motivation for organising this traditional event.

This year's programme offered visitors a varied selection of lectures on current IT topics. Thanks to them, students from the Faculty of Information Technology were able to get a clearer idea of possibilities for employment in the field. "I am pleased with the high participation by both company representatives and students at our faculty. It's great that even the lectures starting later in the day were packed. And the discussions were lively throughout the whole of the event", says the event organiser, who is responsible for cooperation with partner companies at the FIT.

Each of the speakers offered their specific point of view and outlined the perspective in "their" field of IT.  The aim of the event is not only to get acquainted with the latest technologies and trends in the world of IT, but to create a friendly space where students, graduates and representatives of industrial companies can meet and share experiences, career paths, opportunities, dreams and ambitions and get motivated for their further development. "At the We Live IT conference, I liked the stands with experts from the world of work who were happy and very willing to talk about the work they do. Some talented students were even able to arrange an internship. I appreciate the fact that everyone was able to find something to suit them in the programme - interesting lectures and panel discussions. And there were some great refreshments too.  I am glad that I was also able to contribute a little towards the success of the event", says Lukáš Matuška, one of the first-year students at the Faculty of Information Technology who helped out at the event, sharing his impressions.

Our industrial partners evaluated both the activity of students at the Faculty of Information Technology and their professional knowledge in a positive light. "As far as I am concerned, it was definitely a successful event. As I recall, this year had the highest ever student turnout. My impression of the event as a whole is that it is on an upward trend, and that is important. Even our last lecture was well attended, which makes us happy", says Radek Štourač, a graduate of the FIT at the CTU and founder of Kinali.

And you can see for yourself that IT was very much alive this year in our photo gallery.

 

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BUT will offer new double degree program in cooperation with Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT

Brno University of Technology in cooperation with the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT created a new double degree program. On November 9, rector of BUT, Ladislav Janíček signed the contract with Professor Jari Hämäläinen, Vice-Rector responsible for international activities of LUT. It is a joint study program of Faculty of Information Technology of BUT and LUT, which will be offered to FIT students as part of the study program Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence. The unique combination of subjects from both institutions aims to deepen students' knowledge, especially in the field of computer vision and image processing. The double degree program will be created on the basis of successful cooperation between the Faculty of Information Technologies and LUT.

Also, as members of European Universities Linking Society and Technology (the alliance was established to support long-term collaboration in the areas of education, research, innovation and service to society), they discussed the new funding proposal related to ERASMUS +, which will be presented on the Online information session: EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES, Erasmus+ 2023 on 15 November. The goal of BUT and LUT is to present the importance of their common activities and new parts of cooperation which should lead to improvement to mobility between the students and academics and the intensification the current collaboration.

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FIT BUT scientists are developing an app for psychotherapists. Using deep learning to analyze therapy sessions

To offer psychotherapists systematic feedback on individual therapies and to improve the overall quality of psychotherapeutic care in the Czech Republic - this should be achieved by the new DeePsy application enabling automatic speech processing. Researchers from the BUT Speech@FIT group and their colleagues from Masaryk University are currently working on its development. The application should be completed in June next year.

In their practice, psychotherapists lack feedback that would allow them to continuously evaluate their work. "Psychotherapy is a demanding activity in which therapists process a considerable amount of information. They analyse some information consciously, but much more is processed unconsciously and intuitively. They can thus easily miss, for example, subtle signals of a client's discomfort or even deterioration. Clients are usually solving their own problems rather than evaluating the professionalism of the therapist's performance. In addition, some research has revealed a declining level or stagnation of psychotherapeutic qualities over time," explains Pavel Matějka from the BUT Speech@FIT group.

Manual transcription of individual sessions and their subsequent analysis are too time-consuming. That's why experts from Masaryk University turned to researchers from FIT BUT, who specialise in automatic processing and mining of information from speech. The test version of the DeePsy application, which works on the principle of deep learning, offers psychotherapists automatic transcription of sessions and analysis of their content.

Graphs comparing client and therapist speech show who spoke more during the session and what the average number of words per minute was. Keyword analysis can also reveal what emotions were prevalent in the speech or what proportion of verbs were phrased in past, present or future tense. The app will also assess the frequency of the most used words.

"Research studies show that when the language of the client and therapist differs significantly, either in content or form, it can indicate problems in the therapeutic relationship. DeePsy will alert the therapist to such a mismatch. How this information is handled, however, is up to the therapist. We only provide information to the therapist," adds Matějka.

To extract information from speech, the FIT researchers use automatic speech recognition, natural language processing and machine learning technologies. They trained the neural network algorithm on several thousand hours of audio recordings - from interviews to phone calls to spoken monologues. Yet right from the start, they ran into a problem: "We found that in therapy sessions, speech is very different from regular speech. Clients are usually emotionally distraught, so they repeat words much more often - perhaps three to five times before moving on. It took us a lot more time to come up with a meaningful transcript of the interviews from the start," Matějka adds.

The DeePsy app also includes a client questionnaire system that, together with the audio recordings, allows for systematic feedback to work with clients. "We will also work on evaluating therapist interventions. The algorithm should be able to recognise whether the therapist frequently asks questions, interprets, provides information or makes recommendations," says Matějka.

The web application, which is being developed as part of a Czech Technology Agency project, is currently being tested by researchers together with therapists at the Psychosomatic Clinic and the Therapeutic Port. It should be ready in June next year. "We hope that it will provide psychotherapists with user-friendly and useful feedback that will enable them to improve the quality of psychotherapeutic care in the Czech Republic," Matějka concludes.

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BUT launched the first interfaculty quantum link in the Czech Republic connecting FIT and FEEC

In 2021, the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication of the Brno University of Technology opened a new Quantum Security Laboratory, where you can find equipment used to ensure communication resistant to attacks by quantum computers (find more details here). Now the scientists have transferred the quantum link from the laboratory environment to a real operational network connecting the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication (FEEC) and the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), i.e. two campuses located in different parts of Brno. This connection represents a further step towards building a quantum network and strengthening the cybersecurity research.


In addition to the aforementioned faculties, the university's rectorate as well as the Computing and Information Services Centre (CISC), which prepared a suitable route on the existing optical infrastructure, participated in the construction of the link. The new encrypted connection corresponds to a real installation and will primarily serve research and education.

More here
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FIT researchers work on preventing laser dazzling of pilots by developing a security system that finds the attacker

The pilot is preparing for landing on the runway when a blinding green beam illuminates the entire cockpit. It was just hit from the ground by an attacker using lasers. Each year, the police register several dangerous incidents that could potentially result in a tragedy. Therefore, the Václav Havel Airport in cooperation with the Czech Police reached out to researchers from the FIT BUT, CTU and the University of Defence. The goal is to design a system of aerial protection against low-power lasers.

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