News

A FIT BUT team won the fifteenth year of the most prestigious multi-agent programming competition, MAPC 2021. Consisting of František Zbořil Jr., Václav Uhlíř as the main programmer and doctoral students František Vídeňský and Martin Šůstek, the team succeeded in global competition at the event, which compares different programming systems and approaches to the design of multi-agent systems. The team developed their own system, which succeeded in a series of challenges called Agents Assemble. "In this competition, the agents need to be quick, independent and have the social abilities to cooperate and resolve conflicts. We opted for a more reactive approach in which agents are not burdened by the commitments of previous plans and have the ability to quickly react to unexpected changes in the system. This paid off and our system outperformed other teams who relied on more stubborn agents," explained František Zbořil Jr. The aim of the MAPC competition is to promote research and development in the field of multi-agent system programming. The solutions and results of this competition are then regularly published in scholarly journals.

In the past weeks, the faculty prepared around eighty emergency packages which will enable students of follow-up Master's programmes to pass practical laboratory workshops even at home. The equipment kits will facilitate distance learning in the Design of Embedded Systems (NAV) and Principles and Principles and Design of IoT (TOI) courses. "We hope that this will at least partially compensate for the absence of students from laboratories where they would have had this equipment at their disposal. The packages contain a development kit and components for a total of six practice tasks for the NAV course. For the TOI course laboratory workshops, we provided the same development boards as in the NAV course package," described Václav Šimek from the Department of Computer Systems, who prepared the student packages.

The We Live IT conference, which took place online last week, offered seventeen specialised topics, meetings with ten graduates and six e-stands. At the event, which aims to introduce students to interesting topics, technologies and procedures in IT, twenty speakers presented their work to over 140 participants. For example, they talked about modern methods of software development and deployment, the basics of chatbots, artificial intelligence or smart robots. Recordings of most of the lectures are now available on the conference's website.