News

Students of the Faculty of Information Technology of BUT Tomáš Chlubna and Aleš Řezáč and their colleague Veronika Kamenská from FEEC received the Zdena Rábová award from Pavel Zemčík, the Dean of FIT. This award is presented to prominent personalities from among the faculty students for their active participation in science and research and for their overall contribution to the faculty's prestige.

Three students created the Nepanikař (Don't Panic) mobile application, which can provide immediate assistance to people with panic attacks or people thinking of suicide. In addition to the undisputed social benefit, the mobile application also gained considerable media attention. Currently, the application has 25 thousand downloads and contributed to saving more than thirty lives. You can read more about the application HERE.

The Speech@FIT group achieves another great success in an international competition. Its members, Shuai Wang and Hossein Zeinali, received award certificates for the first place in the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge (VoxSRC) at workshop in Graz. Its aim is to evaluate how well can contemporary methods be used for recognition of speakers in various environments; the participants in the competition were tasked to recognise speakers in the audio track of certain recordings. The VoxCeleb database contains several hundreds of thousands of videos including several thousand recordings of celebrities; the videos range from professionally edited recordings to informal videos containing laughter or noise in the background. 

The objective of the new Czech-Israeli research co-operation is to find new methods for visual geo-location or estimation of depth from an image. The research grant was awarded to the team of Martin Čadík from FIT and the team of Professor Yosi Keller from Bar Ilan University. Together, the two teams will use the convolution neural networks to develop a new registration algorithm and descriptor of 2.5D and 3D models, a new method for localisation of cameras in the natural environment and a multimodal dataset for training networks predicting depth from a single image.

If the researchers manage to develop these new methods, the results of the joint research could advance the development of computational photography and could also be of some use in medicine or security.

The international project will last for three years. Its Czech part is financed by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, the Israeli part by the Ministry of Science and Technology Israel.