News

On Wednesday 31 January, the Economic Committee of the Chamber of Deputies held a seminar on the security threats of artificial intelligence. Kamil Malinka from FIT BUT presented his expert view to a wide audience from the state, commercial and academic spheres as well as representatives of defrauded citizens at the invitation of MP and chairman of the subcommittee on consumer protection Patrik Nacher. 

He spoke about deep fake scams. Artificial intelligence is constantly increasing their sophistication. "These are attacks on biometric systems, identity theft, hate propaganda and more. Artificial intelligence gives attackers "powerful new tools" against which we are relatively powerless", Kamil Malinka explains. Voice deepfakes are already at such a high level that it is impossible to distinguish an artificial voice from a real one by ear. With a human voice, an attacker calls and demands something. It may seem like someone you know is calling from a known number, but in reality it is a complete stranger from a different number and you won't have the slightest suspicion that it is a fake. What's more, this is how a robot programmed for this purpose can communicate with you.  The success rate of such calls increases with how much or how little one concentrates on them. When attention is fragmented and under pressure, people are much more likely to fall for a scam.



Kamil Malinka is working on the issue of deep fakes and their impact on security as part of the Security@FIT research group. Together with another group of researchers from Speech@FIT and Phonexia, they are collaborating on cybersecurity research as part of a Home Office challenge. The aim is to develop tools that can reliably identify man-made recordings.

From 14 to 15 February we will welcome Professor Laura Pozzi from the Swiss University USI Lugano to our faculty. She will start her program at FIT with a dissertation review of Ing. Jiří Matyáš: The use of formal methods in approximate calculus. 

From 2 pm onwards, she will then give a talk in room E104 on XPAT: A Parametrizable Template for Approximate Logic Synthesis, in which she will discuss her research work on approximate computation, a paradigm for inexact computation with the aim of saving energy, area and/or delay compared to exact computation when the resulting error is bounded. The full abstract of the talk is below.

There will be an opportunity for any discussion after the talk and also on the morning of February 15.

Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss my research work in the field of Approximate Computing, which is a paradigm for computing inexactly in order to save energy, area, and/or delay when compared to exact computation, as long as the incurred error is limited. After providing a brief introduction to the field, I will focus in particular on a method we have recently devised, called XPAT, to derive approXimate circuits through a PArametrical Template by the use of satisfiability techniques. The method takes in input an exact circuit and an error threshold that a user is prepared to tolerate, and in output it generates an approximate circuit which is guaranteed to never differ from the exact by more than the given error threshold. The method's key idea is to fit the desired approximate circuit onto a parametrical template, and to let an SMT solver shape the final solution by choosing the values of the parameters which will make the error constraint satisfiable.

The decision to study at university is not an easy one. There are many questions in one's mind. Is IT the right choice for me? Will I find a meaningful job afterwards? Will I like my chosen school? Will I move to another city for it? At FIT we are well aware of this and that is why we try to make this process as easy as possible for our potential future freshmen by letting them see behind the walls of our faculty, soak up its atmosphere, meet members of the Student Union of FIT BUT and get authentic information and answers to all the questions from the most responsible - current FIT students. 

Every year we organize an Open Day on two dates. The current editions were held on 19 December 2023 and 26 January 2024 with a total attendance of more than 1100 visitors. The DOD program is designed to show our faculty in all its forms to prospective students. An introductory lecture will familiarize them with studying at FIT and the admissions process, FIT students will give them a tour of the faculty and show them our laboratories, and they will also have the opportunity to visit the stands of corporate partners or visit the student club U Kachničky and ask questions about anything that interests them in connection with the Faculty of Information Technology.

We are very pleased with the positive feedback on both DODs and hope to continue to meet many of their visitors in new roles.