Vojtěch Mrázek of FIT received the Česká hlava award

Vojtěch Mrázek of the Faculty of Information Technology of BUT received the most prestigious Czech award for science and research, the Česká hlava award. On Sunday, he accepted the award for his research into intentional errors in integrated circuits.

Even an error can lead to progress, particularly if the error is made intentionally. That is one way to summarise the work of Vojtěch Mrázek of the Department of Computer Systems at FIT BUT. He has studied the use of machine learning for optimisation and approximation of digital circuits for several years. Simply put, he is looking for errors that can simplify a circuit and thus save energy. The results can be utilized in mobile phones, wearable electronics or intelligent sensors, to name a few areas of application.

"These devices are technically more and more complex and the power sources available are limited despite the fact that the consumption of the circuits increases due to the complexity. This is where the technique called approximate calculation is used because it allows to significantly reduce the power input of circuits for the price of inserting a small mistake into the calculation. For example, if we tolerate a small error in a 2-bit multiplier, such as that 3 x 3 = 7 instead of 9, we can save 26% of power," explained Vojtěch Mrázek.

In some applications, users do not need to obtain perfect output - for instance in image processing, these small errors cannot even be detected by human eye. However, the complex integrated circuits contain hundreds of different elements - how do the developers know where they can make errors that are useful without compromising the whole system?

Together with his colleagues, Vojtěch Mrázek created a kind of a "guide" dealing with this problem. They published thousands of circuit designs containing various compromises between the error, power output and efficiency so that other researchers can use these designs directly in their applications without having to design these circuits themselves.

"We used evolution algorithms that gradually modify the circuit in such a way that its error and consumption improve. There are thousands of such steps, which we subsequently need to evaluate. To do that, we use mathematical methods for calculation of error, heuristic estimates of the consumption and all the data are processed using a supercomputer. We thus managed to design circuits with errors described on various levels - from transistors, through basic logic gates to combination of larger functional elements," Mrázek explains.

Mrázek's solution combines two fields - evolutionary optimisation and electronics design - and thanks to the use of machine learning, the results surpassed existing designs created by humans. For his work, Mrázek already received the Joseph Fourier Prize this year, presented by the Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Lehn, as well as the bronze medal in the HUMIES award in Japan. On Sunday, Vojtěch Mrázek received the highest award for Czech authors of patents and new technologies - the Česká hlava award in the Doctorandus of technical sciences category.

"I very much appreciate the Česká hlava award. I hope this success will help to popularise our field and encourage other people to follow in our footsteps in order to further advance the research in this area," said Mrázek.

Other awarded researchers included Jan Brábek, who focuses on migrastatics, a brand new cancer therapy described by world leading scientists as the biggest discovery since the introduction of anti-cancer immunotherapy; Miroslav Bárta, Egyptologist and archaeologist; Daniel Bím, who described the nature of the uneven bond of carbon and hydrogen which enables for new ways of production of medication; and Ciur, a company that created a new waste polymer-based ingredient to asphalt mixtures which can improve the quality of roads in our country.