Research Centre of Information Technology

Research Centre of Information Technology is part of IT4Innovations project the which aims to build a national Centre of Excellence in the field of information technologies. The Centre will enable strengthening concentration of a wide range of scientific disciplines relating to information technologies and thus achieve development in respective spheres. Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology (FIT BUT) is involved in the project alongside the research leader of this project - VSB - Technical University of Ostrava and other partners - the University of Ostrava, Silesian University in Opava and the Institute of Geonics AS CR.
Part of the project is acquisition of a high-performance supercomputer that is planned to be put into operation in 2014, in which time it is supposed to rank among the top 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world. This supercomputer will be placed in Ostrava.

FIT BUT takes active part in the project as a leader of two work packages Multimedia Information Recognition and Presentation and Secure and Safe Architectures, Networks, and Protocols. The aim of FIT BUT in the project is strengthening the co-operation with the industry.

The Multimedia Information Recognition and Presentation research team will systematically investigate the processing of multimedia data, particularly the features on the level of signals acquired by means of various sensors. This will enable multimodal information identification and retrieval as well as research in techniques of efficient computing using multimedia data. The emphasis will especially be put on image, video and speech analysis, document and multimedia data information retrieval, imaging, visualization and modelling including human tissue models, accelerated computing using specialized hardware and techniques of semantic web, formal languages and grammars. The program results in the form of new methods, techniques and knowledge related to the above mentioned fields of research will not only be used to improve the parameters of the existing applications but are also expected to facilitate the creation of completely new applications that have so far been impracticable for both technical and economic reasons.

Main task of the Secure and Safe Architectures, Networks, and Protocols research team is systematic development of the concept of security and reliability in the field of information technologies (i.e. development of applications with respect to their security and reliability). Both intentional and accidental abuses of information technologies (IT) represent one of major threats to modern society. In the context of knowledge and IT abuse the demand on the system security becomes as important as its functionality, price or maintainability. Current increase in the complexity of computer systems along with cumulative urgency of tasks they have to cope with requires solving a crucial and highly non-trivial question of how to ensure infallible operation of these systems also in situations in which they are not exposed to potential attacks. Contemporary security and reliability-focused IT research comprises a wide range of issues starting with solving purely mathematical problems (e.g. in the area of cryptographic algorithms or formal verification) up to applied research (e.g. authentication) while making use of the knowledge from a wide range of scientific fields (e.g. biomedicine). Within the research new methods and approaches are developed and investigated concerning the protection of computer systems against attacks, early detection and identification of the attacker, threat elimination, etc. However, these new methods are also intended for reliable computer systems that make a minimum number of mistakes and are capable of self-configuration and self-healing. Apart from software, the research pays special attention to hardware whose security, reliability and resistance to attacks need to be ensured as well. This concerns e.g. specialized embedded systems and networks providing wireless communication with the surroundings that also need to be secured against both intentional and unintentional abuse.