News

At the beginning of September, FIT VUT will host a two-day workshop/seminar on "Patents – what inventors should know," led by renowned researcher and mentor Shmuel Ur. The event will take place on Tuesday, September 2, and Wednesday, September 3, 2025, at the faculty premises and will also be available to watch online via live stream. The workshop is part of the European project VASSAL, in which our faculty and experts from the VeriFIT research group are the main partners.

Shmuel Ur holds more than 230 US patents and the title of IBM Master Inventor. He has a fifteen-year career at IBM Research and a track record of successful collaborations with leading technology companies and startups (including the investment company Intellectual Ventures). In his courses, Shmuel combines stories from his own practice with specific examples and provides participants with practical recommendations. Course participants will gain an overview of how to avoid the most common mistakes in protecting intellectual property, how to use patents not only as legal protection but also as an economic tool, and why „problems are more important than solutions“.

The program will be divided into two approximately two-hour blocks each day, with a lunch break and a final discussion. In addition, in-person participants will have the opportunity to consult with the lecturer individually about their own ideas, research projects, or patent strategies. The event is completely free for participants. Registration for the course is non-binding and serves to better organize capacity.

More information about the event can be found here.

On Thursday, June 26, 2025, the winners of the Joseph Fourier Prize received their awards at a ceremony held at the French Embassy. Third place in the competition and a special prize went to Anton Firc from the Institute of Intelligent Systems and the Security@FIT research group for his research in the field of cybersecurity focused on voice deepfakes. The ceremony was presided over by the French Ambassador to the Czech Republic, Mr. Stéphane Crouzat, and Jean-Marie Lehn, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry and initiator of the entire event.

Every year, this prestigious scientific competition rewards doctoral students for their research work in the field of computer science and informatics. The competition brings together the authors of the best works with a special focus on the design and use of computationally intensive algorithms and methods, simulations and modeling, and the manipulation of large volumes of data. Anton Firc focuses on the security implications of voice deepfakes. It should be noted that FIT VUT doctoral students have repeatedly celebrated successes in this competition in recent years.

More information about Anton Firc's award and his scientific work can be found HERE.

A major international research workshop, JSALT 2025, organized by Johns Hopkins University (Maryland, USA), is taking place at the Faculty of Information Technology at BUT and will run until the end of July. Thanks to this event, around one hundred leading global researchers in language and speech technologies have come to Brno. Four teams are working for six weeks on current research topics related, for example, to large language models or speech processing under challenging conditions. The workshop program is further enriched by plenary lectures delivered by prominent experts from both industry and academia. An especially interesting talk is expected on Tuesday, July 15, when Loïc Barrault from Meta AI in France will give a presentation.

Loïc Barrault will speak at 11:00 at our faculty with his lecture titled Large Concept Model: beyond token-based Large Language Models. In this talk, he will explore (certainly also socially somewhat provocative) questions such as whether large AI models can acquire key characteristics of human intelligence, such as reasoning, planning, hierarchical, or multilingual information processing. The very topic invites a wider audience — you can either attend in person in room E112 at FIT BUT or follow the live stream on the JSALT YouTube channel.

It should be added that Loïc Barrault is a renowned researcher in the field of machine translation, who has worked at universities in Le Mans and Sheffield, among others. Today, he is recognized as one of the pioneers in integrating language, speech, and visual information, significantly contributing to the development of adaptive models over the long term.

You can find more information about the workshop, which can also be seen as a recognition of the long-standing work of the Brno-based BUT Speech@FIT research group and its head, Professor Jan Černocký, in the press release HERE.