This year's Zdena Rábová Award goes to Sára Jobranová and Ondřej Sedláček

This year, during the matriculation ceremony (September 12), the traditional Zdena Rábová Award was presented, which recognizes outstanding students from our faculty for their active involvement in science and research and for enhancing the overall prestige of FIT. This year's award goes to Sára Jobranová and Ondřej Sedláček.

Bc. Sára Jobranová has been involved in the simulation and analysis of quantum circuits in the VeriFIT group since her second year of bachelor's studies. She also wrote her bachelor's thesis on this topic, the results of which were published at the prestigious (CORE A) international conference ICCAD'24 in New Jersey, where she also presented them. The MEDUSA quantum circuit simulator she developed for a class of circuits using amplitude amplification significantly outperforms other existing techniques and is the fastest in the world. In addition, Sára actively participated in two editions of the EXCEL@FIT conference, where her contribution won three awards in 2023 (the expert public award, the expert panel award, and the industry partner award). In 2024, she represented FIT in the 8 z VUT competition, where she won. In 2024, she also represented FIT at a summer internship at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and participated in the Munich Quantum Software Forum international conference. She is currently continuing to develop techniques for the effective analysis of quantum circuits in collaboration with colleagues in Taiwan and Japan, with publication expected in 2026. It is no surprise that Sára has achieved excellent academic results throughout her studies, both at the bachelor's and master's levels.
"Of course, I greatly appreciate such achievements; it is definitely very motivating in the sense that what I do is probably useful and I probably do it quite well. At the same time, however, the most important thing for me is that I am working on something that makes sense to me and that I find interesting, and that is something that no award can give me if I didn't feel that way from the beginning. Once you find such a job and stick with it, in the worst case scenario, you will be satisfied with yourself. And in the best case scenario, others will notice it too," says Sára Jobranová, looking back on the award and her entire academic and research career to date.

Ing. Ondřej Sedláček is a talented young researcher. During his studies, he collaborates with the CESNET association on research and development in the field of cyber security. In this domain, he first researched the issue of automatic device type recognition based on network communication, on which he wrote and presented an article at the Excel@FIT faculty conference (awarded by the expert committee) and, in particular, an article at the NOMS2024 international conference (O. Sedláček and V. Bartoš, "Fusing Heterogeneous Data for Network Asset Classification – A Two-layer Approach"). In the last year, he has focused on the topic of anomaly detection in system logs. He wrote an exceptionally high-quality thesis on this topic, which evaluated existing approaches in detail using a newly created (and published) framework. Based on the results of this work, an article was written and submitted to the CNSM 2025 conference (currently under review), and other articles are in preparation. The outputs of the student's previous work have significant practical implications, as they are integrated into systems used in practice by security teams to detect and resolve cyber incidents. The current topic of anomaly detection is also expected to have practical applications through integration into a commercial product of a company involved as a partner in the research project in which the student is involved.
"In my opinion, perseverance is key to success, combined with enthusiasm for IT and what you do in it. Like most people, I came to FIT without a specific idea of what I would end up doing in IT. At the beginning of my bachelor's degree, however, I had the opportunity to work with the ANT@FIT group, and when choosing a more specific topic, I was tempted to try applied machine learning. The opportunity to focus on cybersecurity appealed to me the most," Sedláček recalls the beginnings of his research focus.

We congratulate both award winners and thank them for their excellent representation of the Faculty of Information Technology.