Research Laboratories

Laboratory of Software Architectures and Information Systems (LaSArIS) concentrates on analysis and development of information systems, process and data modelling, management of their implementation, and relevant software technologies including mobile platforms....

Contact: doc. RNDr. Tomáš Pitner, Ph.D.

WWW pages: http://lasaris.fi.muni.cz/

The Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCI) has been established to carry out broad research of human-computer interfaces, especially on its recently most popular aspect, virtual reality systems. The research issues of this complex project divide conceptually into three areas: its mathematical and algorithmic part, its system issues, and its application. Algorithmically, team members develop a suite of powerful mathematical routines and data structures for fast visualization, real-time collision detection (with degree of separation and depth of penetration), position and orientation data filtering, interpolation and extrapolation of rotations, and for several auxiliary problems. On the system level, multiple computer processors are tied together with diverse and imperfect peripheral devices, and with a human being into one working system. The principles and the integrated tasks are tested in three core applications: general manipulation methods in VE, molecular force field visualization, and haptic visualization of 2D and 3D objects for visually impaired people.

Contact: doc. Ing. Jiří Sochor, CSc.

WWW pages: http://decibel.fi.muni.cz/

Design and Architecture of Digital Systems is built up for teaching and training of most contemporaneous technology electronics circuitry. The Laboratory is equiped by programming fields FPGA technology, microprocessor controllers, digital signal processors and necessary measurements. Laboratory disposes of modern resistant computers and developing software.

Contact: prof. Ing. Václav Přenosil, CSc.

WWW pages: http://l202.fi.muni.cz/

The Laboratory of Optical Microscopy (LOM), which is a part of the Centre for Biomedical Image Analysis, is interested in automation of image acquisition and image analysis in optical microscopy. The research is mostly focused on processing of tissues, cells, cell nuclei, chromosomes, and genes in order to contribute to understanding of genetic material organization in human cell nuclei. Instruments developed for this purpose in LOM are unique in the world. The laboratory is an interdisciplinary work place gathering experts in computer science, mathematics, physics, molecular biology, and medicine. It employs mainly alumni, PhD students and MSc students of the Faculty of Informatics, Faculty of Science, and Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University Brno. It also collaborates with other institutions in the Czech Republic and in the world. The current research is aimed at 2-D and 3-D analysis of fluorescence-stained interphase nuclei, metaphase spreads and tissues. Both basic research and clinical applications are performed. The basic research tries to contribute to the understanding of the chromatin organization in human cell nuclei. The clinical applications are carried out in collaboration with several medical centres and are aimed at the study of mechanisms of induction, diagnostics and prevention of deleterious human diseases.

Contact: prof. RNDr. Michal Kozubek, Ph.D.

WWW pages: http://cbia.fi.muni.cz

The Laboratory of Natural Language Processing at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, performs both theoretical and applied research in the following areas: analysis of all levels (morphological, syntactical and semantic level) of written texts; corpus management and lexical databases; semantic representation of natural language expressions; semantic web, ontologies, knowledge representation and reasoning; synthesis and recognition of speech (spoken Czech); dialog representation and management; applications of machine learning techniques to disambiguation of corpus data. Besides the research objectives, the NLP Laboratory aims at training undergraduate and postgraduate students in a newly appearing interdisciplinary specialisation that is known as "language engineering".

Contact: doc. PhDr. Karel Pala, CSc.

WWW pages: http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/

The Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Systems (ParaDiSe) aims at intensifying the basic and applied research in the area of concurrent, parallel and distributed systems. The mainspring of research in ParaDiSe is the application of theories which underlie, or should in future underlie, the specification, modelling, analysis, and verification these systems. The current focus is on techniques and tools for automated verification of large concurrent systems.

Contact: doc. RNDr. Jiří Barnat, Ph.D.

WWW pages: http://paradise.fi.muni.cz/

Laboratory of Searching and Dialogue focuses on research in two intuitively interconnected disciplines -- searching in collections of digital data and dialogue systems -- which have been observed as completely independent in the past. The field of dialogue systems includes not only specification and implementation of underlying models, dialogue strategies, descriptive languages, but also basic speech-processing technologies (recognition and synthesis). Quality of dialogue systems is chiefly influenced by quality of information a search engine retrieves, which is in turn used for generation of responses to users' queries. This implies an effective searching in various collections of data. Traditional retrieval techniques based on exact match are inapplicable in such environments. Proximity concepts (similarity) are typically much more fruitful for retrieving documents. Laboratory concerns index structures for similarity searching in both centralized and distributed environments. Dialogue systems supported by similarity searching forms a modern and perspective field with direct impacts on future information technology. Students interested are invited to join the laboratory, where they can co-operate on various implementation and research projects.

Contact: doc. RNDr. Ivan Kopeček, CSc., prof. Ing. Pavel Zezula, CSc.

WWW pages: http://www.fi.muni.cz/lsd/

The Laboratory of Advanced Networking Technologies is a research laboratory specialising in advanced network protocols and applications requiring high-speed networks. Laboratory is a result of joint effort of Faculty of Informatics and Institute of Computer Science of Masaryk University and also of CESNET, not-for profit organisation responsible for the national research and educational network and its applications. Laboratory is currently equipped with the state of the art visualisation facilities, including 3D projection system, several 2D projection systems and audio equipment, all interconnected by network accessible programmable switcher. With all this equipment, this laboratory will become Czech first Access Grid point.

Contact: doc. RNDr. Eva Hladká, prof. RNDr. Luděk Matyska, CSc.

WWW pages: http://sitola.fi.muni.cz

The Knowledge Discovery Group focuses on the development of pre-processing methods for data mining (including active learning, and frequent patterns as new features), natural language learning (including morphological and syntactic disambiguation, text categorization, information extraction), mining in spatio-temporal data, difficult patterns classification (e.g. in biomedical data) and integration data mining tools with database systems. Members of this group provide most of the courses on artificial intelligence at the faculty, namely machine learning, natural language learning, knowledge discovery in databases, artificial neural networks, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, and computational logic.

Contact: doc. RNDr. Lubomír Popelínský, Ph.D.

WWW pages: http://www.fi.muni.cz/kd/

The Laboratory of Quantum Information Processing and Cryptography is a workshop focusing on information aspects of quantum information processing, especially on quantum cryptography, theory of information, quantum communication and algorithms. The laboratory is also involved in theoretical aspects of cryptography, particularly in solving problems regarding security by means of theory of information.

Contact: prof. RNDr. Jozef Gruska, DrSc.

WWW pages: http://quantum.fi.muni.cz/

The Laboratory of Security and Applied Cryptography (in Czech Laboratoř bezpečnosti a aplikované kryptografie - LaBAK) enables both graduate and pre-graduate students to gain practical experience with current security and crypto solutions and technologies. The main areas of interest are computer network security (for both wireless and metallic networks), smart card security and related cryptographical applications, biometric authentication and the use of cryptography for creation and operation of secure systems. More specific areas of interest are selected with respect to current developments and in accordance with senior members' current research focus. Our goal is to create an environment that allows students to get hands-on experience with the available technical solutions. Lab work is to a large extent supervised by our doctoral students. The laboratory is open to students who work on their projects and theses.

Contact: prof. RNDr. Vašek Matyáš, M.Sc.,Ph.D.

WWW pages: http://www.fi.muni.cz/labak/

The Systems Biology Laboratory offers a challenging multi-disciplinary working environment for students aspiring to be in the forefront of modern computational biology. The long-term research goal is to develop and apply computational science and technology to enhance our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the behavior of living systems and develop scalable methods and tools for modeling and computerized analysis of large and complex biological systems. Recent advances in systems biology, scientific computing and mathematical modeling of biological processes have started to fundamentally impact the way we approach drug discovery, improve diagnosis, therapy and prevention of various diseases, or produce emission-neutral biofuels.

Contact: prof. RNDr. Luboš Brim, CSc.

WWW pages: http://sybila.fi.muni.cz/