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Siri, Alexa, Google - we talk to them all today. But who breathed life into them? Speech recognition has gradually spread from IT labs to smart homes and has become a common part of everyday life. Getting information from audio recordings is becoming increasingly important. For the first time in its history, the Czech Republic will host the international conference Interspeech, which will take place in Brno from August 30 to September 3, 2021. Hundreds of world experts will arrive in the Moravian metropolis. More than 1400 will join the event online. Specialists will present news from the field, such as how to start using machine learning with a minimum of training data, or whether coronavirus infection can be recognized from the cough.

Miloš Musil from the Department of Information Systems at FIT created a new web application that helps scientists with ancestral reconstruction. He developed the unique tool in collaboration with scientists from the International Clinical Research Centre of St. Anne's University Hospital and researchers from the Loschmidt Laboratories at Masaryk University. There, they use the application to study molecular evolution and search for ancient proteins that no longer exist today. These can help, for example, in pharmacology, medicine or biotechnology. 

Early detection of a cyber-attack on Internet of Things (IoT) networks can literally save you from unforeseeable consequences, be they an invasion of your privacy or disruption of the energy grid. Autonomous devices cannot be protected by antivirus programs, so another solution is needed. Researchers from the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology teamed up with experts from Flowmon Networks and partners from South Korea to develop tools that enable IoT monitoring and diagnostics.

Over five dozen papers were presented in the final selection of the Excel@FIT student conference, which was held on Thursday by the Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology for the seventh time. FIT students presented their papers selected for the final round by a committee of experts from both the academic and commercial sectors. The faculty distributed CZK 160,000 among the best contenders.

Every day, we rely on the flawless functioning of dozens, if not hundreds, of applications and programs running on our computers, be they web browsers, information systems, communications software, or a multitude of hidden programs running in the background. We have come to expect applications not only not to crash suddenly, but also to respond very quickly to our commands. However, every user has experienced a situation where a new update to an important app caused it to slow down noticeably or even freeze up completely. This is exactly what Jiří Pavela, a doctoral student from the Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology, who is also one of the awardees in the Brno Ph.D. Talent competition, wants to prevent.

It has been more than 48 years since humans last walked on the surface of the Moon. A potential return to the Moon has recently become a frequently discussed topic and it attracted the attention of Jakub Karpíšek, a FIT student, who decided to research this area as part of his Bachelor's thesis. The jurors of the 8 of BUT were fascinated by his lunar landing simulation and awarded him a second place in the competition.

Imagine yourself pulling out your phone to take a picture of a beautiful view. You point the camera towards the landscape and your device tells you, in augmented reality, the names of surrounding hills, their elevation, tourist paths in the area and can even show you the terrain contours. The new software tool created by researchers of the CPhoto@FIT BUT group is able to recognise the photographer's location and the photographed object and knows what the surrounding area looks like under different weather conditions. This allows you to edit the picture at home, e.g. make it sharper or adjust the shadows. On top of that, it can take you back to the place where the picture was taken using virtual reality.

Autonomous cars and receptionists, applications for the visually impaired, voice recognition, virtual power stations or developing a cure for Covid - all this could be achieved by employing artificial intelligence. Brno's experts on artificial intelligence set themselves a goal to achieve its greater practical use and, on Thursday, introduced a common platform - Brno.ai. It was created not only by professionals from FIT BUT and Masaryk University, but also by representatives of IT companies, the South Moravian Region and the City of Brno as well as the JIC innovation agency.

Spanish researcher Alicia Lozano-Diez still has several days left of her research stay at the Faculty of Information Technology. At the end of January, after twenty months of hard work, she will finish her robust speaker recognition research on which she has been working within the scope of the prestigious European grant Marie Curie H2020 intended for young and talented researchers.

It was a close call, but team of researchers from the KNOT@FIT group - Martin Fajčík, Martin Dočekal, Karel Ondřej and Pavel Smrž - managed to come in third at the EfficientQA competition held as part of the NeurIPS 2020 conference. Their system called BUT R2-D2 succeeded alongside such big names as Facebook or Microsoft and triumphed in the "machine competition" where it also competed against humans in a trivia quiz.