Elite Czech AI Club: The National Center for Artificial Intelligence Begins Operations

A center is being established in the Czech Republic to bring together top-notch research teams, companies, and public institutions. Their common focus? Artificial Intelligence. The official kick-off meeting for the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCUI) project took place on April 22 at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics at the Czech Technical University (CIIRC CTU). The six-year grant project was supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic under the SIGMA program. And the competition was tough: only 4 projects out of 19 submitted applications were successful.

NCUI is being established as a platform for applied research and innovation in AI – it is therefore neither a purely academic initiative nor an ordinary project. The consortium consists of 6 academic institutions and more than 30 industrial and government partners; the non-profit sector is represented by prg.ai. The coordinator is CTU, specifically the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEL) and the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics (CIIRC) at CTU. Leading laboratories with experience in AI research and development are participating from Brno University of Technology (BUT). These include the Faculty of Information Technology, from which several experts are involved, as well as the FAST, FSI, and FEKT faculties. The range of companies and institutions nominating software engineers or field specialists is broad; to name a few: Valeo, Siemens, Škoda Auto, Phonexia, Bulovka University Hospital, Metrostav, ČEPS, České Budějovice Heating Plant, etc.

Implementing AI in practice together, faster and more securely

The project, with a total budget exceeding half a billion crowns, is a response to the rapid rise of AI in a range of application sectors, such as healthcare, energy, construction, manufacturing, etc. It is, in other words, an attempt to provide scientific boundaries for this development. NCUI consolidates national research capacities, creating a common platform where researchers and companies do not tackle similar problems separately but share know-how and jointly develop solutions—which may result in software, prototypes, methodologies, or other practical outcomes. NCUI focuses on the practical implementation of solutions, not merely on publications and partial results. At the Faculty of Information Technology, which is a key member of the consortium, the NCUI project is coordinated by Prof. Jan Černocký. When asked how he views the purpose of the new project, he responds: “It’s actually an elite club of Czech artificial intelligence connecting top-tier university laboratories and companies that want to work intensively with AI. And it’s also the first real state support for artificial intelligence in our country—that’s crucial.”

The consortium pursues several goals. The most general one is to unite top Czech teams, companies, and public institutions so that AI can be put into practice faster and more safely. Social responsibility in the deployment of new technologies is a key criterion for its activities. The NCUI also aims to promote the sharing of interdisciplinary knowledge from fields such as computer science, robotics, healthcare, and autonomous systems. Finally, the involved members aim to strengthen the influence of scientific findings regarding AI on important political and public decisions—the NCUI systematically links research with policymaking and contributes to AI regulation, the Czech Republic’s strategic direction in AI, and informed decision-making by public administration.

FIT is part of the Czech AI community

What role does the Faculty of Information Technology play in the elite Czech AI community? Jan Černocký mentions two levels: FIT provides technical expertise and, at the same time, connections to key institutions and industry partners on an international scale.

Developing new solutions is a natural part of the project—in this regard, the faculty’s “speech researchers” will focus on large AI models for speaker-oriented speech processing. Based on pre-trained models, they will design and implement procedures enabling speaker verification and identification, as well as speech recognition in long recordings potentially containing multiple speakers. Applications also include the detection of voice forgeries, so-called deepfakes. The application of these results will be ensured through collaboration (not only) with one of the project’s corporate partners, Phonexia. For Phonexia and other industrial partners, membership in NCUI will open doors to potential customers beyond their traditional scope. At the same time, speech and language technologies are not the only area of interest for FIT VUT researchers that will find application in the project. Another principal investigator on the project is Prof. Martin Čadík, who will coordinate and conduct research in the field of computer vision, primarily focusing on estimating the position and orientation of cameras in natural environments.

The aforementioned international contacts of the faculty’s researchers, which they bring to the project as their unique asset, as evidenced recently by, for example, the organization of the prestigious speech and language technology workshop JSALT 2025 and participation in the significant Archer project supported by the European Defence Fund, which focuses on the critical and objective assessment of the performance of speech and language technologies for defense and security.

The National Center for Artificial Intelligence project promises that AI research and development in the Czech Republic will receive strong support and will be conducted safely and in a socially responsible manner. For our faculty, this serves as proof that we are part of Czech AI research and collaboration.