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The Grand Auditorium of the Karolinum in Prague hosted the ceremonial appointment of new professors on Monday 16 June 2025. The Scientific Council of Masaryk University nominated fourteen candidates for appointment, including Pavel Čeleda from the Faculty of Informatics. He received his decree from the President of the Czech Republic Petr Pavel.

Professor Pavel Čeleda has been working at MU since 2006, when he joined the Institute of Computer Science. He has been working at FI MU since 2007. He graduated from the Military Academy in Brno, where he also received the Rector's Award in 2002 for outstanding results during his Master's studies. He defended his dissertation on “Increasing reliability and diagnostics of real-time operating systems” in 2007 at the University of Defence. In 2004-2005, he spent eight months in France on a PhD study stay at the ENSIETA school in Brest. After returning from France he became involved in research at MU, where he subsequently transferred. In 2014 he defended his habilitation thesis on “Network Traffic Analysis for Cyber Security” at MU.

Since his arrival at MU, he has been actively involved in cybersecurity research in two main areas: network traffic analysis and cybersecurity education. The first area includes hardware acceleration of traffic processing in high-speed networks, network traffic measurement using IP flows, and behavioral analysis and anomaly detection on computer networks. The chosen approaches allow real-time lossless measurement of network data and monitoring of communication flows in large-scale networks.

The second area of research is the environment for cybersecurity research and education and new methods for practical cybersecurity education. In a virtualized environment, it is possible to perform complex attack scenarios, analyze their progress and learn the habits of correct and timely responses to them. The developed tools enable automated preparation and execution of exercises and training of security teams. The automation and adaptation of training procedures provides the individual with a higher quality of education and at the same time allows to educate a larger number of students. The educational process emphasizes hands-on learning, active student engagement, and guided learning based on data collected through methods using learning analytics and instructional data mining.

Among the main results of Prof. Čeleda are lossless creation and collection of IP flows describing data communications on a computer network, a system for monitoring network traffic and detecting anomalies in high-speed computer networks, and the Cyber Polygon Platform (KYPO CRP). The achieved research results have attracted interest of the professional public as well as the state and private sector. The network and security technologies developed have helped to establish and develop the Masaryk University Security Team (CSIRT-MU), which cooperates with a number of national and international security teams. Applied research results have been successfully transferred to three university spin-off companies - Flowmon Networks (now Progress Software), AdvaICT (now Progress Software) and Cognitive Security (now Cisco Systems). The Cyber Polygon platform has been made freely available as open-source software.

Prof. Čeleda has published a number of peer-reviewed international papers. As a researcher or co-investigator, he is involved or has been involved in almost two dozen R&D projects of foreign and national funding agencies. One of the current projects is INJECT, which deals with the preparation, implementation and evaluation of tabletop exercises for managing cyber security crises and dealing with incidents threatening critical information infrastructure. He also collaborates with partners from the academic, industrial and government sectors. As a member of the program or organizing committee, he has participated in the preparation of 27 international conferences and workshops. He was awarded the 2016 Minister of the Interior Award for Outstanding Achievements in Security Research, Experimental Development and Innovation for his outstanding results in the Cyber Polygon project.

At the Faculty of Informatics of MU, Prof. Čeleda is currently teaching Cyber Security in Organisation, Advanced Topics of Cyber Security and Cyber Attack Simulation Seminar. Under his supervision, students have completed 7 dissertations, 21 master theses and 35 bachelor theses. He has worked with more than 200 undergraduate and graduate students in his project activities.

We cordially congratulate the professor on his appointment.

An overview of all newly appointed professors is available in the press release (in CZ) by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.

Author: Marta Vrlová, Office for External Relations and Partnerships

Photo: MEYS