Third place in the 2025 Joseph Fourier Prize goes to FIT BUT thanks to Anton Firc.

On Thursday, June 26, 2025, the winners of the Joseph Fourier Prize received their awards at a ceremony held at the French Embassy. Third place in the competition and a special prize went to Anton Firc from the Department of Intelligent Systems and the Security@FIT research group for his research in the field of cybersecurity focused on voice deepfakes. The ceremony was presided over by the French Ambassador to the Czech Republic, Mr. Stéphane Crouzat, and Jean-Marie Lehn, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and initiator of the entire event.

This prestigious scientific competition rewards doctoral students every year for their research work in the field of computer science and informatics. It is organized by the French Embassy in Prague in cooperation with Eviden. The competition brings together authors of the best works with a special focus on the design and use of computationally intensive algorithms and methods, simulation and modeling, or the manipulation of large volumes of data. This year, in cooperation with IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, the special prize was awarded again: access to 250,000 standard core hours on supercomputers in Ostrava.

Anton Firc focuses on the security implications of voice deepfakes. As he himself states, this is currently a socially crucial topic, but research is still in its infancy. Detecting deepfakes, which attack not only companies and state institutions but increasingly individuals as well, is not easy. It is based on voice biometrics systems using neural networks to detect anomalies in recordings. However, these tools are not flawless; one issue, for example, is their transparency—in layman's terms, we do not always know exactly how they make their decisions.

First place this year went to Pavel Petráček from the Czech Technical University in Prague for his research and development of small unmanned and autonomous drones. Second place went to Zdeněk Kasner from Charles University, who works on generating text from data using language models based on neural networks.

It should be noted that doctoral students from FIT VUT have repeatedly enjoyed success in this competition in recent years. For example, last year Karel Beneš and Juraj Síč were successful, with the latter winning first place for his research into methods using finite automata, a simple computational model with a wide range of applications.

For more information about Anton Firc's research to date, see the interview with the award winner HERE.