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A reception held at the BUT Rector's Office on Friday, August 1, marked the end of the international research workshop JSALT 2025, organized by the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. The event, now in its 32nd year, attracted more than 100 researchers from 22 countries working in the field of speech and language technologies. It took place at the Faculty of Information Technology at BUT over a period of six weeks (preceded by a summer school).

The program was based on the work of four research teams, which presented their findings during the last days of the workshop, all of which were related to the topic of machine learning applied to human speech. Although we are a small country, speech and language technologies rank us among the most important global centers, alongside the United States and China. The Czech Republic's, and specifically Brno's, footprint in this area of artificial intelligence is undeniable, thanks to the Speech@FIT research group and names such as Hynek Heřmanský, Jan Černocký, and Lukáš Burget.

The goal of JSALT is, of course, to push the boundaries of research. However, perhaps an even more significant outcome of the workshop can be seen in the promotion of international scientific cooperation. Many of today's technologies have their roots in research and collaborations that began at JSALT. We would like to thank the organizers, presenters, and participants for their work and enthusiasm!

More detailed information about the workshop, the work of our "speakers," and a link to the event's photo gallery can be found HERE.

Are you studying for a master's degree, or are you a doctoral student or postdoc at FIT VUT? Are you currently working on an interesting research project and attracted by the idea of its practical application? Sign up for the fall run of the Applied! From Research to Business program.

Thanks to this program from the South Moravian Innovation Agency JIC, you will learn how to commercialize the results of your research work. What can you expect? The Applied! program (formerly known as JIC Ph.D. Academy) will help you during eight practical meetings to:

• identify the commercial potential of a research project,
• learn how to present it clearly and evaluate its market potential,
• understand the basics of technology transfer and gain an overview of financing options,
• establish contacts with mentors from JIC, other experts, and inspiring founders of startups with academic roots.

Each block, starting at 1:00 p.m. and ending at 5:00 p.m., combines expert lectures, workshops, mentoring, and networking. The venue is JIC INMEC, Purkyňova 127, Brno-Medlánky.

• October 2: How to present your research project?
• October 9: How to identify commercial potential?
• October 23: How to build a project based on academic knowledge?
• October 30: How to approach technology transfer?
• November 6: Pitch training session and mentoring with JIC consultants
• November 20: How to verify the commercial potential of a project?
• November 27: How to finance the commercialization of projects?
• December 11: Mentors Day

Program price: CZK 3,000 incl. VAT More information about the program can be found on the JIC website.

Applied! offers you the opportunity to connect the worlds of academia and industry, teaches you to recognize opportunities, and supports your entrepreneurship.

In July of this year, the well-known search engine for academic texts, Google Scholar, published a new ranking of journals and conferences based on citation frequency for the five-year period 2020–2024. The metrics for this service include all articles that Google Scholar had in its database as of July 2025. These include both journal articles and selected conference papers. On the other hand, journals with low publication activity (less than 100 articles for the five-year period) are excluded. What is important is that several works by researchers from our faculty have achieved significant success.

An important periodical in the Engineering & Computer Science category, subcategory Computer Hardware Design, is the journal IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems. In this journal (which has a Web of Science Impact Factor of 3.1 and is therefore classified in the Q2 quartile), the article Improving the Accuracy and Hardware Efficiency of Neural Networks Using Approximate Multipliers (147 citations) – a significant part of its author team consists of members of VS Evolvable Hardware Lukáš Sekanina, Vojtěch Mrázek, and Zdeněk Vašíček. The same trio of authors is also behind another successful article, Libraries of Approximate Circuits: Automated Design and Application in CNN Accelerators, which was published in the IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems and ranked 20th in terms of citations in the relevant comparison. Finally, the names of the same authors, joined by Filip Vaverka, appear under the text "TFApprox: Towards a Fast Emulation of DNN Approximate Hardware Accelerators on GPU", which ranked 31st in terms of citations in the journal Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition.

The fact that we are not only successful in the Computer Hardware Design subcategory is evidenced, for example, by the success of the article Bayesian HMM clustering of x-vector sequences (VBx) in speaker diarization: Theory, implementation and analysis on standard tasks, co-authored by Lukáš Burget. The text ranked 6th among the most cited articles in the journal Computer Speech & Language, with 254 citations.

The complete Google Scholar rankings can be found here.

We congratulate our researchers on these achievements within the international scientific community.