News

Today marks the start of the new academic year 2025/26. Students will not return to lecture halls until September 15, when the winter semester begins, but the faculty certainly did not rest during the summer. The holiday weeks brought both popular traditional events and several new initiatives.

From August 25 to 29, the Summer IT School for Girls took place – the oldest event of its kind in the Czech Republic. It was founded in 2005 by Professor Jan M. Honzík, who pointed out the underrepresentation of women in IT. This year’s edition welcomed 30 high school students. The mission of the Summer School remains the same – in addition to being introduced to the field, participants leave with the conviction that technology and information technology are open to anyone who is interested.

Between June 9 and August 1, the Faculty hosted the 32nd edition of the prestigious Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (JSALT). For FIT, this is a significant recognition linked to the long-term and internationally outstanding achievements of the research group BUT Speech@FIT. More than 100 researchers from around the world participated in the workshop. You can find more details about the event in the press release on the Faculty’s website.

During the summer, the Faculty of Information Technology regularly becomes a destination for international students from partner universities. At the beginning of July, FIT welcomed 32 master’s students from Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. Their program combined academic content with familiarization with the Central European region.

This international atmosphere continued with the ten-day BISSIT (Brno International Summer School in Information Technology), which began on August 18. Participants attended lectures in areas such as cybersecurity, machine learning, interactive applications, cloud computing, and robot programming, while also exploring Brno, Prague, and the Moravian Karst.

From August 21 to 27, FIT hosted 29 students from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Their program included courses on topics ranging from cloud computing and machine learning to cybersecurity, speech processing, and computer vision. The social part was not left out – over the weekend, they visited Prague and got to know Brno through a guided tour.

In August, the Faculty also commemorated an important anniversary – 650 years since the founding of the Carthusian monastery, whose historic premises now house FIT. May this place, where history meets cutting-edge technology, continue to inspire all current and future students.

From September 22 to 27, 2025, Vienna will host the Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity, a week-long meeting of experts, scientists, and students whose research focuses on cybersecurity issues related to the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence. Participants can look forward to a professional program (focusing on topics such as explainable AI, methods for certifying the robustness of neural networks, threat detection and adversarial machine learning), experience sharing, practical workshops, and the opportunity to establish new international contacts.

Representing our faculty at the summer school will be PhD students Ondřej Ondryáš, Jakub Reš, and David Hudák, whose participation was secured by the international project VASSAL, which is a partner of the event. Thanks to this cooperation, it has been possible to link the research activities of FIT VUT in the field of cyber security with a prestigious international educational event. Special thanks for the implementation of the cooperation go to Professor Ezio Bartocci from the Technische Universität Wien.

More information about the event can be found on the official website of the summer school.

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.