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Valdemar Švábenský, a doctoral graduate at FI MU, spent three years of postdoctoral research at prestigious universities in the USA, France, the Philippines and Japan. In the interview, he explains how he got into the teams of the world's most cited researchers, what teaching and research looks like in different cultures and why he is not afraid to say that FI MU keeps up with the world's top institutions. You will also learn what he recommends to young scientists who want to succeed in an international academic environment.

What originally attracted you to the world of computer science?

My father is a computer graphic designer and ever since I was born, he had a work computer at home. It was not so common in Slovakia in the 90s. Computers have always interested me - first and foremost, of course, games, which I learned to play in preschool. But I also enjoyed learning from my father how computers worked. At the same time, I've always had a knack for math and analytical thinking, and when I first got into programming at 15, I felt I was good at it. I knew then that I wanted to study computer science at university.

Why did you choose FI MU?

Primarily, I was fascinated with cybersecurity while growing up. When I was about 12 years old and started discovering that the Internet brought with it things like hacking, malware, and social engineering, I thought it was extremely cool. At the same time, in addition to cyber attacks, I also found it interesting to learn about defense options, encryption, and the like. And when I was 18 years old, when I was looking at universities in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, FI MU was the only one I think at the time that had a significant presence in cybersecurity research and teaching.

The second factor was my friend and academic role model Martin Ukrop. When I was in my final year, he was already studying at FI MU, and he was very enthusiastic about it. He said that as a student, I could contribute to research projects and that students could be involved in teaching.

Would you make the same decision today?

I am very happy with my decision and would definitely choose FI MU again today. In addition to gaining professional knowledge, I met great people there.

After obtaining your PhD, you traveled around the world for three years and collaborated with a number of outstanding scientists. Please summarize your international experience for us.

After defending my Ph.D. in the summer of 2022, I traveled to the USA for a year at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). This was followed by a long journey east: from the US, first to an internship in France (Sorbonne Université), then home for my visa, then to an internship in the Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University), and finally I docked in Japan (Kyushu University) continuously until the spring of 2025.

In the US, you worked in the research group of Ryan Baker, one of the most cited researchers in the field of applied machine learning and data analytics in the context of education. How did you manage to join his research team?

During my PhD at FI MU, I did an internship in the USA at Northern Kentucky University. I presented my Ph.D. research, one of the professors found it interesting and recommended me to Ryan. We had a short phone call and he said he was in the process of recruiting postdocs. There was about a three-round selection process and I passed. I couldn't believe how it worked out myself because I thought that very prestigious universities wouldn't even consider talking to me. It's great that a person from a less known country/university gets a chance. Ryan explained that he doesn't care if the university is 10th or 500th in the rankings, but he is primarily looking for a person who will strengthen the group.

How did the collaboration work?

Working with Ryan was perfect. Each member of the team was an expert in a different area, we also learned from each other and Ryan was in regular contact with everyone. We won the Best Paper Award at a major international EDM conference for our first paper together.

My contract was primarily for research, but I also showed an interest in teaching. One semester, Ryan and I taught a hands-on course on data mining methods because it is important for me to be in contact with students as well. I tried to represent what I learned about teaching at FI MU in a good way.

From the US, you went to the Sorbonne Université for a fellowship, which you won thanks to the Joseph Fourier Prize in 2022. Together with Dr. François Bouchet, you focused your research on learning analytics. You then also worked on measuring systematic errors in machine learning models in the context of learning. When we talked about this after your return, you were hoping to publish the research - was it successful? And how well received was it?

We completed the two topics in a complicated way remotely over several time zones, but we managed to publish successfully. This enabled me to attend the top LAK conference in Kyoto, where I gathered useful input that I have translated into my new GACR project.

We'll get to your new project in a moment. Please take us through some more of your stops around the world. Paris was followed by an internship at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. How did you get there and what was the purpose of it?

The leader of the group, Professor Maria Mercedes T. Rodrigo, has worked with Ryan for many years. Towards the end of my stay in the US, Ryan and I had an idea for an article in progress and we thought: let's finish it together with her. We planned that after I left France I would stop in the Philippines and we would finalize the article there, and so we did. Secondary goals were that I gave an invited lecture there and mentored students in their final projects.

That sounds like a great collaboration, why did you go to Japan then?

Although I was perfectly happy at my job at UPenn, my life outside of work in the US didn't quite sit right with me and I wanted a change. Japan has always fascinated me. I approached 4 universities where they had research groups dedicated to my field. Kyushu University replied that they had just received a grant and would be recruiting postdocs. The selection process this time was a two-round process and it worked out. I feel that the recommendation from Ryan and the papers published with his group weighed heavily, so finding the second postdoc position was easier than the first.

The research group was huge, with even more people than Ryan's, which made it difficult to navigate at first. I was ready for Japanese names and quickly got used to them, but part of the group was Chinese, and there I had trouble remembering who was who at first. Anyway, I was again lucky to have a lab leader - Professor Atsushi Shimada, who is the second most cited in the field within Japan. I didn't know what level of formality to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised by the relaxed working atmosphere.

How did you cope in an environment with such a different culture and language? Did you communicate in English without any problems?

Prof. Shimada had overseas experience as a postdoc in Europe, and had excellent English, which is not so common in Japan. Paradoxically, the young students sometimes had poorer English than the academic staff who are used to presenting at conferences. When we discussed research involving students, I would slow down their meetings because I was the only one they had to speak English for. My Japanese is quite poor and I was struggling with it for the whole 15 months, even though I tried to learn every day. Probably everywhere in Europe one could more or less survive for a while with just English, but in Japan it's not enough. It was especially difficult when dealing with the paperwork, which in Japan is perhaps the most extensive in the world. Anyway, the Japanese are extremely patient, polite and professional. 

How do you evaluate the contribution of your international experience for your further work?

First of all, it's a huge "boost" to my CV. I was able to focus fully on research for 3 years (except for the first semester at UPenn, when I was also teaching). In this, a postdoc is easier than a PhD. I learned new methods of data analysis and practical techniques that I want to develop further.

Even in the short time since my return, I can already see that the results are paying off nicely: thanks to publications, I've presented at conferences and even a couple of invited talks where I've made more contacts; papers are already gradually collecting citations; we're building collaborations. The network of contacts and letters of recommendation from foreign professors are very much appreciated now that I am applying for an assistant professor position at FI MU. I hope it will come in handy in the future, when applying for joint grants, or vice versa for arranging internships for my future students.

Furthermore, I see it as beneficial that I have gained a new perspective. It has significantly boosted my confidence that the way I have learned to do research in CYBERSEC at FI MU is competently world-class. Even though we are only from a small "Czechoslovakia", we are certainly not somehow inferior. Thus, we have a good chance to succeed even at a prestigious conference and we should not be afraid to try.

Any non-academic benefits?

I have independently organised my own trips around the world and overcome many obstacles in the process. There were many moments when things didn't go well for a long time, I was sad, I missed my family and friends back home. It helped me to get my priorities straight. And there were some great experiences, I met new people, visited cool places - for the US I like to mention D.C., Miami and Las Vegas, and Japan in general everywhere was a dream come true. My friends from FI MU came to visit me once, and when I was showing them around Fukuoka, I felt very proud of how beautiful the city is, and I'm not even a local.

What contrasts or similarities have you noticed in approaches to education in different countries?

In the US, they addressed diversity at every opportunity and sometimes it was too much. I was also surprised by the somewhat punk organisation of teaching there - at MU we have a nice IS system that provides everything you need together. On the contrary, at UPenn they combined separate services, e.g. Moodle for storing materials, Google Sheets for scoring and grading, Piazza as a discussion forum... In research and Ph.D. studies, again unlike in the EU, they were not too interested in quantitative metrics. Assuming the journal was with an honest publisher and proven by the community, they didn't care how high or low the impact factor was, etc.

In the Philippines, I saw how they were limited by a tight budget. The Ateneo is the best university in the country, and privately funded, but the salaries of lecturers and academics were low, and the purchase of technical equipment had to be well considered. I also had the feeling that compared to the US or EU, students valued the options available to them more.

In Japan I was not directly involved in the teaching as most courses are taught in Japanese only, but I saw that the teaching was very traditional - the teacher lectures and the students take notes. There is an emphasis on there always being one right answer and a closed solution. When I showed them the INJECT cybersecurity training platform developed at FI MU, they were surprised by the concept that there are problems that don't have a clearly defined single solution.

How did these intercultural experiences inform your research methods?

In my research, following Ryan's model, I try to solve an interesting problem. When working on an article, I keep in my head that the article must have a "contribution" - even a small one, but it must be there. Whenever I came to Ryan with an idea for a paper, he would ask me, "Will this paper make the world a better place? Why?" I had to think carefully about how the article would be useful and for what target audience. So we filtered through the fact that not every idea is great and discarded the worse ones.

There were also big cultural differences between people's approaches to work in the US and it took quite a bit of time to communicate and clarify expectations between all parties. On the other hand, people were more inclined to work together and help each other more. In Japan, on the other hand, it happened that student A had no idea what student B, who had been sitting next to him in the lab all semester, was working on, and yet they could help each other. Related to that, in Japan I sometimes didn't feel completely like a member of the team. In the US, we shared more who was working on what. Anyway, I really appreciated that both Ryan and prof. Shimada were regularly available to me for feedback. 

Your research papers in the field of cybersecurity and innovative education have received numerous awards. What do you see as the key elements that have enabled you to achieve these successes, and how does your research agenda translate into practical applications?

The most successful projects and articles have always been based on a real need. At MU, for example, it was the need for an environment for practical cybersecurity education. That's how research came about in the past around KYPO CRP and now INJECT. Of course, there were large teams working on it and my role was only partial, so I certainly don't want to take credit for that success.

Overall, the research around learning data analytics is often applied, so when we solve a problem in teaching, we can explore possible solutions, publish it, get feedback from the community, and then deploy it in practice to improve teaching.

For example, my Ph.D. dataset, which is freely available, has had over 1000 downloads and has been applied by researchers from Norway, Estonia, Lithuania and Spain in their work. It is unique in that it represents the interactions of 275 real people in cybersecurity exercises. It took us about 2.5 years to collect it. When you create something that takes this long and has value to the research community, and you make it openly available, people will use it and cite it.

What advice would you give to young researchers who want to gain international experience and successfully establish themselves in academia?

First and foremost is to work on high-quality research during your PhD and publish it in peer-reviewed international conferences and journals. Publications were probably the main criteria that the evaluators looked at in my CV when I applied for postdoc positions and academic internships abroad. At FI MU, it is well understood that the criteria for a Ph.D. naturally point towards this goal of a Ph.D. student, and my supervisor Pavel Čeleda and advisor Jan Vykopal guided me perfectly.

Furthermore, international conferences, internships, and foreign trips are absolutely key for networking. You also need to have some business soft skills. At conferences, you have the opportunity to catch top academics in your field. Since these are very busy people, I always had a short summary ready about my current research. One also needs to be able to sell oneself confidently about what one is good at - in that American style, there is no room for modesty. The person will give you 1-2 minutes and needs to get clearly communicated: why I approached him, who I am, what I am good at and what I want from him.

Finally, I would advise: don't give up. The failures and rejections I have experienced have been far more frequent than the successes. Naturally, the successes are the ones that present themselves on the outside, but they don't happen all the time.

You recently received the aforementioned grant from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic. Can you introduce us to the main goals of your project and what innovations or shifts do you expect it to bring in your field?

The project investigates biases in machine learning models applied in education. The idea for this topic crystallized after discussions with Ryan at UPenn and Radek Pelánek at FI MU. We noticed that in recent years there has been a growing body of publications applying machine learning in educational contexts, but some of the results don't hold water - either the source data for training the model is biased (e.g., not large enough or noisy enough), or some methodological decision within the analysis process could have been made a bit differently and the result would have been completely different. I want to take a more systematic approach to this and explore what happens to the resulting models if I change some detail in the data or method. I hope this will make a shift in that other researchers will pay more attention to the assumptions and properties of the methods used, and also describe them more accurately in the paper.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I like to work out in the gym most of all - it has huge benefits for me on both physical and mental well-being. I also do personal development and self-improvement in various soft skills. I love spending time with friends and loved ones - something I missed a lot when I lived alone for a long time. I enjoy traveling, but it can also be tiring and lately I've had my fill of it. Mostly, I guess nothing beats Japan anymore. And I relax well with movies or YouTube videos. It's a good way to reset the brain and then I can focus on the hard research again.

Thanks for the interview and we look forward to more opportunities to follow your success.

Valdemar Švábenský (Ph.D. 2022) is a researcher and teacher focusing on educational data mining and cybersecurity training. He has worked at prestigious institutions around the world, including the University of Pennsylvania (USA), Sorbonne Université (France), and Kyushu University (Japan). He has published 34 peer-reviewed scientific papers with 63 co-authors and has won three best paper awards at international conferences. As an enthusiastic teacher and mentor, he won two teaching awards at Masaryk University and founded the Elea project - the first mathematics YouTube channel in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In his spare time, he enjoys exercising, personal development and travelling - he has visited 33 countries on four continents.

Author: Marta Vrlová, Office for External Relations and Partnerships at FI MU

Photo: Valdemar Švábenský