2026 Joseph Fourier Prize: Alexander Polok Wins Second Place and a Special Award

On Friday, June 26, 2026, the winners of the Joseph Fourier Prize—one of the scientific awards presented by the French Embassy in Prague—were announced. Second place went to Alexander Polok, a doctoral student at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Multimedia at the Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology.

This prestigious scientific competition, organized by the French Embassy in cooperation with the company Eviden, recognizes the research achievements of doctoral students in the field of computer science and informatics. The competition is open to authors of the best theses focused primarily on the design and application of computationally intensive algorithms and methods, simulation and modeling, or the processing of large volumes of data. Second place earned Polok a cash prize of 40,000 CZK and a scholarship for a one-month internship in France. In addition, the FIT-BUT doctoral student also received a special prize, which was once again awarded this year in collaboration with the national supercomputing center IT4Innovations: access to 250,000 standardized core hours on supercomputers in Ostrava.

In the broadest sense, Polok’s research interests can be defined by the term speech and language technologies. Within this dynamic field, he is primarily interested in the topic of automatic speech recognition in challenging conditions, typically involving multi-speaker conversations (e.g., during meetings). Current systems for processing these speech situations suffer from relatively high error rates. Alexander Polok continues to refine his tool Dixtral, which helps address some of these challenges. “I generally view the Fourier Prize and similar awards as motivation to go the extra mile—to write a report, to try to present my work clearly and, if possible, in an engaging way to a wider audience. And of course, it’s great to know that others also see your work as meaningful,” comments the winner of the Joseph Fourier Prize.

Alexander Polok is a member of the Speech@FIT research group and is involved in several research projects. He has completed multiple research stays abroad, including at Carnegie Mellon University. ISCA Interspeech 2026, the world’s largest conference on speech technologies, accepted his paper Conversational Speech Recognition and Analysis: Progress, Challenges, and Emerging Opportunities with Speech Language Models as a tutorial this year. Read more about Alexander Polok’s research and professional career to date in the article, which is based on an interview with our award-winning doctoral student.