The Czech Republic is a global powerhouse in AI research. The international workshop JSALT 2025 at FIT VUT proves it

Brno, June 17, 2025) From June 23 to August 1, the Faculty of Information Technology at the Brno University of Technology (FIT BUT) will host the 32nd edition of the prestigious international workshop JSALT 2025. This renowned event in the field of artificial intelligence research, organized by Johns Hopkins University in the US, will attract world leaders in natural language and speech processing to Brno. The workshop can be seen as recognition of the long-standing achievements of the BUT Speech@FIT research group and its leader, Professor Jan Černocký.

During the summer weeks, Brno and the Czech Republic will confirm their position as a global research center in one of the key areas of AI. From June 23 to August 1, 2025, the Faculty of Information Technology at BUT will host more than 100 world experts in the field of speech and language technologies. The important Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (JSALT) is organized by Johns Hopkins University in the US in cooperation with partners from the European ESPERANTO project. It is no coincidence that Brno's Faculty of Information Technology is hosting the event – for a university, this is recognition of the long-standing successful work of the local research group BUT Speech@FIT and its head, Jan Černocký. The scientific director of the group is Lukáš Burget. Černocký, Burget, and former group member Pavel Matějka, are ranked among the world's 100 most influential researchers in the field of speech recognition.

Speech data mining, or more sophisticatedly, machine learning research applied to human speech and natural language – this is the simple description of what Černocký and his colleagues have been working on for many years at Brno University of Technology, and what has made them so successful that Czech research is now among the top five in the world. What can actually be “mined” from speech? Keywords, the speaker's age, gender, emotions, level of education... Human-machine communication through speech or text is not an abstract scientific topic; every web browser and social network works with it. Most of us use voice assistants, dictation or navigation, and many have already encountered speaker verification (e.g., in banking services). The results of the research may also be reflected in automatic subtitling, simplifying the reception of emergency calls, psychotherapy session support, communication between air traffic controllers and pilots, and, of course, the security sector. In recent years, new hot topics have emerged, such as the fight against voice deepfakes. Czech contributions can be traced behind many of these technological breakthroughs.

The Czech and Brno legacy in speech processing

The contribution of Czech scientists to the development of speech and language technologies is not as well known to the public as it deserves to be There are few other fields where we can claim such world-class excellence. The Brno-based BUT Speech@FIT group is the flagship of the field. Its origins date back to 1997, when Jan Černocký was affiliated with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Brno University of Technology. The beginnings were organizationally challenging, as he recalls: “The 1990s were very problematic, especially in terms of university funding.” The breakthrough came with international cooperation. Černocký completed his doctoral studies in France, where he established contacts, and in 1999 his team joined the first major European project focused on speech data databases. The real turning point came when he met Professor Hynek Heřmanský, who had been working in the United States since the 1980s. Heřmanský is still a world authority in the field of speech processing and something of a legend in the field. Thanks to him, young scientists from Brno were able to obtain their first internships in the US and become involved in major projects. The group soon moved to the newly established Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology, and success was not long in coming. In 2005, Brno's “speech scientists” surprised the global scientific community in an international evaluation of language recognition systems, and repeated the feat the following year in speaker identification. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know where Brno was. These achievements opened the door to prestigious projects funded by US government agencies, among others. They also had an impact on the Czech economy: from the Brno research environment emerged the company Phonexia, which became the first in the world to offer highly accurate commercial biometric technology for speaker identification using voice, which currently operates in 60 countries around the world.

Today, Černocký's team has 30 members of ten nationalities, including both experienced researchers and doctoral students. Internationalization is a fundamental prerequisite for scientific progress for Černocký: "We've always worked hard at it; we learned that from Hynek Heřmanský. For us in the Czech Republic, it's probably our only chance. Internationalization has a feedback effect and pays off, both professionally and personally." Brno may not be the Oxford of universities, but it excels in certain fields. The BUT Speech@FIT group has no complaints about interest from foreign researchers.

An event where the future is born

Černocký likes to emphasize that, for such a small country, the Czech Republic holds a remarkably strong position in the field. The international community knows that speech technology is developing in the US, China... and the Czech Republic. Thanks to the BUT Speech group, Brno has already become a venue for international events in the past. Černocký and his colleagues have managed to bring the largest conference on machine speech processing, Interspeech, to the Czech Republic for the first time in history (it took place in 2021). And this year, FIT BUT is hosting the leading international workshop JSALT 2025, an event organized by the American Johns Hopkins University. In its more than 25 years of existence, the workshop has been held mainly in the US and Western Europe, and in 2014 it came to Prague. “Yes, hosting JSALT is one of the medals our group wears around its neck,” says Černocký, aware of the significance of the event. A hundred world experts will take part in the six-week research workshop. These include Sanjeev P. Khudanpur (Johns Hopkins University), Ricardo Marxer (University of Toulon) and Ramani Duraiswami (University of Maryland). Participants are divided into four teams, each focusing on a selected research theme. These include improving the ability of large language models (LLMs, e.g. the well-known ChatGPT) to consistently adhere to assigned roles during longer interactions (such as patient-doctor simulations), or simplifying and optimizing speech recognition in complex environments like crowded meetings with background noise.

The workshop, held with the support of the Czech OP JAK program and under the auspices of the City of Brno and the South Moravian Region, aims to push the boundaries of research, foster international scientific collaboration, and involve doctoral and master’s students, who benefit from invaluable mentoring. Many of today's breakthrough technologies have their roots in projects and collaborations that started at JSALT. One example is the automatic translation system found in Google Translate. "The workshop will bring together talented people from all over the world. And sometimes, within a year, a result emerges that turns existing technology on its head," concludes Černocký.

Incidentally, JSALT has a Czech connection written into its name, which commemorates the Czech-American scientist Frederick Jelinek, a native of Kladno and a pioneer in speech recognition research using statistical methods. Jelinek's family left Czechoslovakia after the communist coup and headed overseas. Jelinek spent many years conducting speech research at IBM and Johns Hopkins University. It is symbolic that an event named after a Czech native is being held at FIT VUT, a faculty that has become one of the world's centers for research into the use of artificial intelligence for working with human speech and natural language.