News and events archive

He was drawn to computers since young age. Supporting his passion, his parents bought him the Baltík educational programming environment by Bohumír Soukup. Now, he is one of the Brno Ph.D. talents. The Ph.D. student Vít Novotný develops a next-gen search engine in the MIR research group at the Faculty of Informatics, MU. He tackles problems that Google can’t answer. His project is supposed to help researchers all around the globe. Traditional Search Engines Such as Google and Seznam Ignore Mathematics Researchers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields require access to articles full of mathematics. “Traditional search engines are sufficient for ordinary text documents, but they fall short for mathematics. They only allow the user to search using text keywords, not mathematical formulae. If you search for a scientific article using text keywords, and the article does not contain the keywords, then you may not find the article at all,” explains Vít. Mathematical search engines started to appear at the beginning of the 21st century. The Faculty of Informatics participated at the EuDML European project and developed the MIaS mathematical search engine in 2011. However, MIaS does not take advantage of the latest techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Both Mathematical and Text Search Today’s mathematical search engines can search for text keywords and mathematical formulae. However, text and mathematics are represented separately. Using the latest techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence, hybrid search engines that allow the user to search for mathematics using text keywords and to search for text using mathematical formulae can be developed. We Tested Trains of Thought on the Little Red Riding Hood “We also experiment with representing document by curves. The curves follows the trains of thought in a text document as they change from one paragraph to the next. In our experiments, we used three version of the classic story of the Little Red Riding Hood: the original version from the 17th century, the Grimm version from the 19th century, and the Hoodwinked film from 2005. While the first two versions only differ in their endings, the film only shares the major characters and locations with the classic tale. The keywords were similar in all three versions, but the trains of thought in the film differed significantly from the first two versions,” explains Vít. This novel approach should make it possible to detect plagiarism and to search for semantically similar documents. Brno Ph.D. Talent Award Provides New Opportunities Due to his success in the Brno Ph.D. Award competition, Vít will be awarded 300 thousand Czech crowns over the period of three years. Beside financial support, the South-moravian center for international mobility (JCMM) also organizes seminars for the Brno Ph.D. talents and provides networking opportunities. By creating conditions comparable to top western research institutions, JCMM aims to keep talented young minds in Brno. And what are Vít’s interests besides research? He produces electronic music, sings in an ensemble and co-organizes Animefest, the oldest anime convention in the Czech Republic.

Informatics Colloquium 23. 4. 2019, 14:00 lecture hall D2 RNDr. Vojtěch Řehák, Ph.D., FI MU What is the best timeout? Abstract: We all have some experience with deadlines, and we know how hard it is to deliver results in time, especially when some obstacles with an uncertain solving time may occur. In this talk, we deal with formalisms suitable for modeling and analysis of such systems, i.e., reflecting both timeouts and actions taking stochastic continuous time. We show how this kind of stochastic timed systems can be modeled and what properties can be computed for such models. On surprisingly small examples we also demonstrate some fundamental limits of such models. Then we will consider that some parts of the model are unknown and we take them as parameters that we would like to synthesize automatically. Finally, we will present results allowing for the synthesis of (epsilon)-optimal timeouts in such systems.

Informatics Colloquium 16. 4. 2019, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Dr. rer. nat. RNDr. Mgr. Bc. Jan Křetínský, Ph.D., Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich, FI MU Machine learning in verification Abstract: On the one hand, formal verification methods provide hard guarantees on analysis results, but do not scale well and are often hard to use. On the other hand, machine learning comes with weak or no guarantees, but scales well and can provide more understandable solutions. In this talk, we show several examples how these approaches can be combined and the best of the two worlds achieved. We demonstrate this on controller synthesis and controller representation in the setting of Markov decision processes and games.

Informatics Colloquium 2. 4. 2019, 14:00 lecture hall D2 prof. Mgr. Michal Koucký, Ph.D., MFF UK Approximating edit distance within constant factor in sub-quadratic time Abstract: Edit distance is a measure of similarity of two strings based on the minimum number of character insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into the other. It has numerous applications in various fields. The edit distance can be computed exactly using a dynamic programming algorithm that runs in quadratic time. Andoni, Krauthgamer and Onak (2010) gave a nearly linear time algorithm that approximates edit distance within approximation factor poly(\log n). In this talk I will present an algorithm with running time O(n^{2-2/7}) that approximates the edit distance within a constant factor.

Informatics Colloquium 9. 4. 2019, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Timo Ropinski, Faculty of Engineering, Computer Science and Psychology, Ulm University Interactive Visualization Techniques for Molecular Structures Abstract: Within this talk I will cover our work in the area of molecular visualization, and will present techniques which have been developed with the goal to improve the spatial comprehension of complex molecular structures. First, coverage-based opacity estimation is discussed as a technique to achieve Depth of Field (DoF) effects when visualizing molecular structures. The proposed algorithm is an object-based approach which eliminates many of the shortcomings of state-of-the-art image-based DoF algorithms. Based on observations derived from a physically-correct reference renderer, coverage-based opacity estimation exploits semi-transparency to simulate the blur inherent to DoF effects. Second, I will discuss the integration of diffuse illumination effects into molecular visualization. While current molecular visualization techniques utilize ambient occlusion as a global illumination approximation in order to improve spatial comprehension, interreflections are also known to improve the spatial comprehension of complex geometric structures. To realize these interreflections in real-time, an analytic approach is exploited for capturing interreflections of molecular structures. By exploiting the knowledge of the underlying space filling representations, the required parameters can be reduced and symbolic regression can be applied to obtain an analytical expression for interreflections. I will discuss how to obtain the data required for the symbolic regression analysis, and how to exploit the analytic solution to enhance interactive molecular visualizations. Finally, I will show how this approach can be extended to other molecular representations.

The 13th year of an entertaining competition event with an unconventional program will take place on Saturday 13 April at the Faculty of Informatics and in the Brno parks. 2 to 4 member teams of high school students can take part in the InterSoB to test their rational thinking, teamwork, and communication. There will also be some sporting tasks. Registration deadline: April 8th. https://intersob.math.muni.cz/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=ZeuF0a-bnBM

When choosing his studies abroad, he had been deciding between Prague and Brno. Fairly quickly, he decided for Brno, the capital of IT in the Czech Republic, as he says. International environment, many IT companies and start-ups, opportunity to meet with the community of foreign students and IT gurus in the city, where everything is as a stone's throw away from you. It was a clear choice for Arcadii. He also appreciates university services for incoming students, networking and inclusion to the local community at Masaryk University. Arcadii is a student of the Software Systems and Services Management (SSME), Master degree study programme at the Faculty of Informatics MU taught in English. “Study programme SSME exceeded all my expectations. It is a very well designed multidisciplinary study programme oriented on real problems and projects in companies. It is not just about computer science - what is actually really exciting. It includes marketing, economics, management, teamwork, and soft skills. During the program, we walk the whole path of creating an IT service - from an idea to a final product. It consists of creating a vision, planning, positioning in a market and collaborating with other companies on it. We all work on interim projects in companies. I did mine in Kiwi.com. I strongly recommend these studies to everyone,” says Arcadii. Interested to study SSME? Applications deadline is April 30, 2019. Find out more: https://www.fi.muni.cz/admission/mgr/software-systems-and-services-management-eng.html Note: SSME graduates reach the highest salaries compared to other study programmes at the faculty and also in the Czech IT job market in general. An average fresh SSME graduate salary is 70 000 CZK.

Informatics Colloquium 19. 3. 2019, 14:00 lecture hall D2 RNDr. Radek Ošlejšek, Ph.D., FI MU Semantic data modeling – conceptual view Abstract: In this talk, I will explain the principles of semantic modeling. I will briefly compare popular data models, such as rational vs. NoSQL databases. Then, I will focus on graph ontologies. I will describe their features, the problem of abstraction, information levels (e.g., upper vs. domain ontologies), and other aspects that are important for semantic modeling. The discussion will be supported by practical examples that emerged in our research of the semantic modeling of image content. Examples from the cybersecurity domain will, in turn, demonstrate the abilities and limitations of ontologies for detection and mitigation of cyber threats. Possible utilization of ontologies for formal knowledge modeling in hands-on cybersecurity training will be presented as well.

More information in Czech, in French.

Informatics Colloquium 12. 3. 2019, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Ing. Tomáš Mikolov, Ph.D., Facebook AI Research Recent progress in AI research Abstract: The last decade did bring us many new and improved applications of machine learning. To name a few, we have seen dramatic improvements in web search, user post classification, statistical machine translation, speech recognition, and image classification. But how far are we from the grand goal, which is the development of truly general AI? In this talk, I will present some of the ideas that I find promising for the development of artificial intelligence. These include a discussion about artificial life, dynamical systems, complex adaptive systems, and mathematical models of evolution.

Informatics Colloquium 26. 2. 2019, 14:00 lecture hall D2 RNDr. Kateřina Schindlerová, CSc., Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna Causality in Time Series: A Short Introduction and Current Challenge Abstract: We explain the concept of quantitative causality by various approaches and focus on Granger causality. Causality among a higher number of processes by means of graphical Granger causality will be presented and its applications shown. Current questions and open problems will be sketched from the point of view of heterogeneous and big data.

The International Timetabling Competition 2019 is a scientific competition to solve real-world timetabling problems from universities around the world. Among the organizers is a team from the Faculty of Informatics, led by doc. Hana Rudová. Data from real university timetables that serve as the starting point of the competition are drawn from the UniTime system. There are usually teams of scientists and students in the competitions, but individuals can also be found among the winners. Interestingly, participants are gradually getting new data sets from the organizers with increasing value points. The winner can also be the one who will join later and solve some of the problems. A UniTime-based validator will immediately evaluate the quality of the submitted solution. Since the start of the competition in the summer of 2018, the number of participants has been increasing. New people are still registering, some of them only to access the competition problems. The competition will take place throughout the year until November 2019. The unique UniTime system for university timetabling was created through joint research between Purdue University, Masaryk University, and Charles University. It is a publicly available open source solution that is universally applicable to schools and faculties of various types as well as entire universities. "When we started cooperation with Purdue University on a timetabling system that takes into account student registrations in 2001, we were among the pioneers," says Hana Rudová. From modest beginnings, it has come to the point where the UniTime system is helpful to dozens of institutions for timetabling courses, exams, and events throughout the year.

Prof. Petr Hliněný invites you to one week's workshop in Telč. The workshop focuses on various problems of graph crossing numbers, and more generally with geometric graphs. Date: May 6 - 10 2019

It is a revival of a regular research seminar in the area of discrete algorithms, formal methods and related fields of computer science. The seminar will take place on Monday at 2 pm biweekly during the term. Further information including the list of speakers for the next term can be found on the following webpage. https://www.fi.muni.cz/dfseminar/index.html.en Prof. Dan Král' a deputy of an organizer's team is looking forward to meeting many of you at the seminar talks.

Last year, an excellent scientist and holder of two ERC grants Daniel Kral moved to the Faculty of Informatics. After his arrival at the faculty, he became the head of the laboratory of discrete methods and algorithms DIMEA. Now, the DIMEA laboratory cordially invites to a two-day meeting of Central European scientists and researchers from the field of discrete mathematics and theoretical informatics DIMEA Days. The program will start on Wednesday, June 12 and conclude on Thursday, June 13 Registration ends March 31. Venue: Moravian Museum, Dietrichstein palace, Zelný trh 8, Brno More information: https://www.fi.muni.cz/research/dimea/days19.html.en

Come to taste the atmosphere at the Faculty of Informatics. See the labs to find out what discoveries are coming into the world. Look for top-notch technology, meet with industry experts you can collaborate with during your studies. And also ask current students. You will learn about new study programmes, entrance exams, and how to get to the FI without them. Informatics is not just programming. You can also study graphics, soft skills, help doctors to transmit live operations, guard banking systems or work with nuclear scientists. Program: 9.30, 10.30, 11.30 IQ testing - Mensa ČR 12.30–13.00 Registration 13.00–13.50 Presentation about terms and conditions for study at FI and discussion 14:30–15:30 Introduction to Master study programmes 14.00–16.30 organized excursion to the building of the Faculty of Informatics We are looking forward to seeing you at FI.

Masaryk University Rector’s Award for Outstanding Teachers - more information can be found here. Other information only in Czech.

It scans documents, marks them and sorts them according to given parameters. When asked, it searches the stored data and invoices - simply tell the machine to do so, and it will find the required information. Welcome to the office of the future. A team of IT experts from the Department of Machine Learning and Data Processing at FI MU is also tackling the task of extracting information from scanned documents which would push today's copying and printing machine closer towards so-called document management systems. https://is.muni.cz/do/fi/napsali_o_fi/rok_2018/2018-02-Informatici-udelaji-skenery-chytrejsi.-Naucili-je-zpracovat-obsah-skenovanych-faktur.Interface.pdf find the interview also in MU newsletter Interface: https://www.ctt.muni.cz/media/3101855/interface_02_18_web.pdf

If you are interested in mathematics, see the lecture of professor Rober Bryant from Duke University. The talk is supposed to be understandable to a wide range of scientists and students. 12 December 2018, 5:00 PM Refectory of Augustinian Abbey at Mendel Square - Mendel Museum About the lecture Much of classical mathematics involves finding a configuration or shape that provides an optimum solution to a problem. For example, it has long been known (though a rigorous proof took quite a while to find) that the surface of least area enclosing a given volume is a round sphere. There are many other ways to measure surfaces, though, and finding 'the' surface that optimizes a given 'measurement' (subject to some given constraints) remains a challenging problem that has motivated some of the deepest recent work in the mathematics of geometric shapes. In this talk, I will explain some of the classic ways to measure shapes of surfaces and relate this to classical problems involving surface area (soap films and bubbles) and total curvature as well to as recent progress by myself and others on these important optimization problems.

Let's celebrate the 85th birthday of Josef Gruska. He was interested in quantum computing in a time when it was considered science fiction. His book Quantum Computing was a first one that described the area. He was inducted in the TV doc series the Gallery of the national elite. Professor Josef Gruska and his work have international importance. He is a pioneer in computer science and an extraordinary human. He has been contributing to the development of theoretical informatics. We cordially invite you to see the presentation of Josef Gruska's work in KYPO, 12/12 - 13/12, 4 - 5:30 PM You can see posters, movies, etc. Moreover his collection of original Indian and Japanese drawings.

Kahin Akram Hassan, Linköping University, Sweden 17. 12. 2018, 13:00, A217 FI MU Visual representations ought to be more than aesthetically pleasing and complex — They have to fulfill a function so that target users can easily understand and use them. Conducting quantitative as well as qualitative evaluations with the user in mind, are important for obtaining concrete evidence of the effectiveness of such visual representations. In this talk, I will present the importance of evaluation in Visualization and my research. Bio: Kahin obtained his bachelor's and master’s degree in media technology and engineering at Linköping University, Sweden and is now a Ph.D. student in Information Visualization at the same department. He mainly focuses on user-centered evaluations of visual representations for temporal multivariate data. For more info please contact doc. Kozlíková (barunka.k@gmail.com).

Informatics Colloquium 11. 12. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 prof. Guido Sanguinetti, Ph.D., School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh A computer scientist in epigenetic-land: some statistical challenges in functional genomic data modelling Abstract: New data gathering technologies such as ChIP-seq and BS-seq are allowing scientists to probe the epigenetic regulation of gene expression at unprecedented resolution. Yet the analysis of such data brings several non-trivial computational challenges. Here, I focus on how we can exploit the spatial correlation information to develop more powerful statistical models. I will briefly describe how we developed non-parametric statistical testing techniques for ChIP and BS-seq data, and discuss how spatial information can be used to extract more informative features from such data.

InterLoS* is the 5hour internet team competition. Teams solve ciphers and logical or programming tasks with various difficulties. When? Sunday 9/12/2018, 3 - 8 PM Registration till 8/12/2018 - https://interlos.fi.muni.cz *The Czech for elk is los :-)

Informatics Colloquium 4. 12. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 prof. Ing. Adam Herout, Ph.D., FIT VUT Fully Automatic Traffic Surveillance Abstract: Traffic surveillance cameras can produce a lot of specific data. We are processing the data with the aim to fully automatically obtain as much useful data as possible: camera calibration, make&model fine-grained recognition, speed measurement, and other things. Some things work, some things might in the future.

We cordially invite you to see the legendary performance from May 1969 S úsměvem idiota (a nikdy jinak) (With a smile of an idiot (and never otherwise). It will take place on 21st of November at 7 PM, lecture hall D1 https://is.muni.cz/imgx/z/h/x/m-4analwgmw-c_of5nwvp/vodnansky-a4-page-001.jpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRBaN-QTpM4

Informatics Colloquium 27. 11. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 doc. Mgr. Radek Pelánek, Ph.D., FI MU Adaptive learning: research, development, and connections Abstract: The goal of adaptive learning is to make learning more efficient and interesting by making it personalized for a particular student. In this talk, I will discuss the experience with the development of practically used adaptive learning systems and the research carried out by Adaptive Learning group at FI. I will also highlight connections of adaptive learning to other research areas, focusing specifically on topics studied at FI: machine learning, program analysis, similarity search, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, games, ...

Informatics Colloquium 20. 11. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 doc. RNDr. Tomáš Brázdil, Ph.D., FI MU Verification of Markov Decision Processes using Learning Algorithms Abstract: I will present an application of machine-learning algorithms in the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the state space. I will concentrate on computation of maximum reachability probabilities in MDPs and present two methods based on a heuristic-driven partial exploration of the model. First, bounded real-time dynamic programming that yields precise lower and upper bounds on the maximum reachability probability. Second, Monte Carlo tree search, a method celebrated in various machine-learning settings, that combines exact computation using search trees with sampling methods. I will demonstrate usefulness of these methods in verification of resource access control protocols.

Informatics Colloquium 13. 11. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 doc. Mgr. Hana Rudová, Ph.D., FI MU University course timetabling and International Timetabling Competition 2019 Abstract: University course timetabling belongs to classical problems which have been studied for many years by many researchers. This talk will outline existing research and emphasize new research directions and challenges in this area. It is clear that the organization of international competitions has the high impact on the timetabling research. We intend to discuss the organization of the new International Timetabling Competition (ITC 2019, https://www.itc2019.org) with the aim to motivate further research on complex university course timetabling problems coming from practice. Our goal is the creation of rich real-world data sets. Thanks to the UniTime timetabling system, we can collect a strong set of data with diverse characteristics which we will discuss in the talk. The key novelty lies in the combination of student sectioning together with standard time and room assignment of events in courses.

Let us invite you to the talk of our special guest Prof. Helwig Hauser from the University of Bergen, which will be held on the 8th of November (Thursday) at 3 PM in the D2 room. From One to Many in Visualization A lot of interesting development has been happening in visualization research in the past 25 years. Certain topics, like medical visualization, flow visualization, tabular data visualization, and network visualization have attracted continued interest over many years and every year fascinating new findings are presented. We focus on the important work of optimizing our solutions and maturing the field. Every now and then, however, we also see promising chances for radical innovation, for new pioneering research in visualization. In this talk, we take a look at one of these chances, i.e., to transition from the visualization of individual datasets to visually studying large sets of datasets, for example from medical cohort studies or from numerical ensemble simulations. It seems that relevant new visualization challenges arise, when hundreds or thousands of datasets are studied simultaneously—in particular, when these are sets of multi-aspect spatiotemporal datasets. This talk brings up some of the related major questions (for example: how to map to the 2D/3D visualization space), together with examples of related work, and hopefully inspires some bright minds to conduct more visualization research on this topic of increasing relevance. Helwig Hauser's Short Bio Helwig Hauser graduated in 1995 from Vienna University of Technology in Austria and in 1998 he finished his PhD project on the visualization of complex dynamical systems (flow visualization). In 2003, he got his Habilitation at TU Wien, entitled ''Generalizing Focus+Context Visualization''—in 2006 this work was awarded with the Heinz-Zemanek Award by OCG. Already in 2004, his work on the interactive visual analysis of simulation data won the IEEE Visualization Contest in Austin. In 2013, Helwig Hauser then received the Dirk Bartz Prize for Visual Computing in Medicine from Eurographics (medical ultrasound data visualization). With >190 refereed publications and >7500 citations (h-index ≈ 50), he is an active and respected member of the international visualization research community. Recently, he chaired/hosted several important visualization conferences, including EuroVis 2011, PacificVis 2012, IEEE InfoVis 2013 & 2014, and VCBM 2016 in Bergen, and he has been serving as associate editor for three of the central journals (including IEEE TVCG, CGF, and C&G). After first working for TU Wien as assistant and later as assistant professor (1994–), he changed to the new VRVis Research Center in 2000 (having been one of the founding team, also). There, he led the basic research group on interactive visualization (until 2003) before he became the scientific director of VRVis (–2007). Since then, he is professor in visualization at the University of Bergen in Norway, where he built up a new research group on visualization.

Informatics Colloquium 6. 11. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Assoc. Prof. Dr. Standa Živný, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford Power of algorithms for homomorphisms and generalisations seen from both sides Abstract: The topic of this talk is the computational complexity of and the power of algorithms for the homomorphism problem between two relational structures, also known as the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). We briefly discuss the known algorithmic and complexity classifications for CSPs parametrised by the source or target structures. We then discuss in more detail a classification of general-valued CSPs parametrised by the source structures. This part of the talk is based on joint work (published in FOCS 2018) with Clement Carbonnel and Miguel Romero.

Informatics Colloquium 30. 10. 2018, 14:00 ledture hall D2 Digitalizace průmyslové výroby Abstract: Digitalizace zásadním způsobem mění svět kolem nás. Mění chování zákazníků, kteří stále častěji požadují výrobky uzpůsobené jejich individuálním požadavkům za nákladových podmínek hromadné výroby. Tím vytváří nové výzvy pro firmy - jejich výroba musí být rychlejší, efektivnější, flexibilnější, dosahovat vysoké úrovně kvality a samozřejmě vysoké úrovně bezpečnosti. Řešení těchto výzev pak přinášejí opět právě digitální technologie, které transformují způsob, jakým jsou výrobky navrhovány, jak jsou vyráběny i jak se dále vyvíjejí. Například tzv. digitální dvojčata, tedy digitální modely výrobků, výrobního zařízení, výrobního procesu i celého výrobního provozu umožňují výrobek i způsob jeho výroby simulovat v softwarovém prostředí. Je tak možné odhalit chyby a vyladit všechny parametry ještě předtím, než je výroba vůbec spuštěna. Zásadní průlom přináší také rozšíření využití aditivní výroby, neboli 3D tisku. Ten umožňuje tvar výrobku lépe uzpůsobit jeho požadovaným vlastnostem a současně zásadním způsobem snížit množství použitého matriálu. Postupující digitalizace rovněž dopadá i na pracoviště. Mění se organizace práce nebo potřebné kompetence zaměstnanců, což se nezbytně promítá do nutných změn ve vzdělávání. Nejen těmto tématům se bude ve své přednášce a následné diskusi s vámi věnovat generální ředitel skupiny Siemens v České republice Ing. Eduard Palíšek, Ph.D., MBA.

Informatics Colloquium 23. 10. 2018, 14:00 ledture hall D2 RNDr. Radim Ošťádal, NBÚ Praha Abstract: Cílem prezentace je základní pochopení činnosti a spolupráce organizací zabývajících se kybernetickou bezpečností v České republice. Hlubší pohled je poskytnut na vládní CERT tým, na jím poskytované služby a na jeho spolupráci s dalšími organizacemi. Na závěr se posluchač seznámí s různými typy kybernetických cvičení.

Informatics Colloquium 16. 10. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 prof. RNDr. Jiří Zlatuška, CSc., FI MU Abstract: Zpracování informací a informační systémy umožňují hromadné zpracování „objektivních dat“ pro potřeby řízení i hodnocení. Má to za následek výraznou změnu kultury institucí a firem z hlediska faktorů, které se pro ně stávají určujícím parametrem řízení. Obecný trend tímto směrem je dlouhodobější, týká se řady oblastí činností a vede k nárůstu byrokratizace spojené s „objektivitou“ takových přístupů, stejně jako k náhradě odborníků v oboru či oblasti generickými managery usměrňujícími práci odborníků tak, aby se vešla do obecných přihrádek těchto managerů. Z hlediska informatiky jako disciplíny, která tyto postupy nástroji, které vytváří, umožňuje, usnadňuje a podporuje, je vhodné mít na zřeteli širší kontext těchto změn i jeho rizika - ať již při vlastním použivání těchto přístupů, tak při výchově studentů, kteří takové nástroje budou v budoucnosti vytvářet a používat.

About the lecture Population protocols are a mathematical model of distributed computation introduced by Angluin et al. in 2004. The original purpose of Angluin et al. was the theoretical study of systems consisting of identical, cheap mobile devices with tiny computational resources, like sensor networks. However, since its introduction, the model has also been used to analyze the behavior of chemical systems and of people in social networks. Population protocols help us to pose and study many fundamental questions about distributed systems: What can be computed by agents wishing to remain anonymous? Are leader processes necessary for optimal speed? Can macroscopic "phase transitions" be "programmed" at a microscopic level? Is it possible to check automatically that a protocol works correctly? Is it possible to automatically synthesize a protocol for a given task? In the talk, I will introduce the population protocol model with the help of several examples. More precisely, I will present the problem of the Black Ninjas in the Dark, and the different solutions given to it by their Senseis. I will also show animated simulations of some protocols. The lecture will be held at Mendel Museum, Refectory of Augustinian Abbey (Mendlovo nám. 1a, Brno) About speaker Javier Esparza is a full professor at Faculty of Computer Science, Technische Universität München, Germany. The Chair held by Prof. Esparza develops methods, algorithms, and tools to locate and eliminate errors in software systems or verify their correctness.

Informatics Colloquium 9. 10. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 doc. RNDr. Lubomír Popelínský, Ph.D., FI MU Abstract: It is five years when the first monography on Anomaly analysis have been published. We will review new research as well as application direction that newly appeared from that time e.g. anomaly explanation, class-based outliers, graph and sequence outliers, and outliers in text among others.

About the lecture The most famous open problem in theoretical computer science, known as the P vs. NP problem challenges us to prove that for some natural search problems, no efficient algorithm is possible. At the moment, we have no idea how to prove such a statement. In order to make meaningful progress, we can restrict the class of algorithms we consider and show that, within these restrictions, no efficient algorithm exists. In this talk, I consider a natural restriction to symmetric algorithms. I explain how symmetries arise naturally in computational problems and why algorithms that respect these symmetries have inherent limitations. Many of our most powerful algorithmic techniques are symmetry-preserving, while others are not. Exploring these limits offers a rich research agenda combining logic, algebra and combinatorics with algorithms. The lecture will be held at Mendel Museum, Refectory of Augustinian Abbey (Mendlovo nám. 1a, Brno) About the speaker Anuj Dawar is the Professor of Logic and Algorithms at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in London.

Informatics Colloquium 2. 10. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 prof. RNDr. Daniel Kráľ, Ph.D., DSc., FI MU Abstract: The theory of combinatorial limits provides analytic tools to study large discrete structures. Such tools have found applications in various areas of computer science and mathematics. In particular, analytic representations of large graphs nourished progress on many difficult problems in extremal graph theory. We will present an introduction to this rapidly developing area of combinatorics and illustrate the range of its applications on several specific problems concerning graphs and permutations. We conclude with some of the future research directions related to the presented concepts.

We cordiallly invite all to the lecture of David Pavlik, Chief Information Officer Kiwi.com. David graduated at Faculty of Informatics, MU in 2001. He then worked in variety of roles, e.g. in Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, SpaceX. He will talk about how to be successful in your career and how important is what he learned at Faculty of Informatics. Title: Learning of first principles matters Abstract: To be really successful in your career not only you need to understand the business context, but you need to understand the fundamentals of the domain you are working in. In this lecture, we are going to walk you through multiple examples of how college education was successfully applied in various disciplines at world’s most successful companies. We will talk about the application of building your own grammar, discuss how deep knowledge of statistics can increase the revenue of your business or save lives, and why you should understand programming language principles. The objective of this lecture is to set the context for why it does matter to spend the next few years in college. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Botanicka 68a, Brno lecture hall D3, September 20th, 2018, 18:00 About the speaker: David graduated at Faculty of Informatics, MU in 2001. He then worked in variety of roles, ranging from Service Delivery Lead at Microsoft, Technical Program Manager at Amazon.com, Engineering Manager at Netflix or various software roles at SpaceX. Most recently he is back to Brno and enjoying working as Chief Information Officer with an amazing team of Kiwi.com. The lecture will be given in English.

Informatics Colloquium 22. 5. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Mouzhi Ge, Ph.D., FI MU Recommender System Research in E-Commerce Abstract: Over the last decade, recommender systems have been widely applied in e-commerce, for example, video recommendations in Youtube, book recommendation on Amazon, and movie recommendation on Netflix. Recommender systems are developed to help users find relevant products that may interest them. The goal of recommender systems is to reduce the information overload and provide personalized recommendations for users. In this talk, I will discuss the state-of-the-art research of recommender system in E-Commerce, which includes rationale and algorithms inside the recommender black box, important features and evaluations in recommender systems. Finally, a real-world food recommender system project in E-Commerce will be described and demonstrated to show how to construct and evaluate the recommender system in practice, as well as possible challenges that are related to the food recommender systems.

Informatics Colloquium 24. 4. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Kateřina Falk, Ph.D., Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Drážďany, Německo Astrophysics and fusion research with high power lasers The most powerful laser systems in the world and their uses Abstract: The talk will be about speaker research on dense plasmas using some of the most powerful lasers in the world. At the first an outline of the field will be given, including an introduction of some of the best laser laboratories and about applications in laboratory astrophysics and fusion technology. Thanks to the development of high power and high energy lasers, scientists are now able to generate extreme states of matter, accelerate particles and simulate many astrophysical phenomena including the interiors of planets, supernova explosions, gigantic astrophysical jets or even create antimatter. By dynamically compressing matter, lasers can create exotic phase transitions like the diamond rain inside Neptune or formation of rare structures like londsdaleite, which is harder than diamond. One of the most important applications of this research is an efficient generation of clean energy using thermonuclear fusion, the same reactions that power all stars including our Sun.

Informatics Colloquium 17. 4. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 doc. Fotios Liarokapis, Ph.D., FI MU Virtual Reality Assessment for Examining Functional Neurological Symptoms Abstract: Functional neurological symptoms (FNS) are somatic symptoms that still remain poorly understood. Their diagnosis is made by exclusion of organic cause and therefore does not provide any specific cues for the subsequent treatment. Virtual reality (VR) seems to be mature enough to be experimentally tested as a potential therapeutic intervention for the functional neurological disorders. Biofeedback is the process of gaining greater awareness of many physiological functions primarily using instruments that provide information on the activity of those same systems, with a goal of being able to manipulate them at will. Some of the processes that can be controlled include brainwaves, muscle tone, skin conductance, heart rate and pain perception. This presentation will evaluate immersive virtual reality as a potential therapeutic tool for a treatment of functional neurological symptoms. The first part will examine the effects of immersive virtual reality intervention on changes in autonomic arousal in FNS (in both healthy subjects and patients) by introducing emotional stress. The effect of immersion manipulation on changes in emotional reactivity to stress inducing stimuli is assessed by measuring skin conductance and heart rate variability. The second part will examine how biofeedback affects immersive virtual reality intervention on effective connectivity patterns in patients with FNS.

Informatics Colloquium 10. 4. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Ing. Leonard Walletzký, Ph.D., FI MU Can Cities be truly Smart? Findings from the Smart Service research group Abstract: Two years ago the Smart Service research group was established at the Faculty of Informatics. During this short period of time, its members have become relevant part of the research community, focusing on new challenges in ICT applications (IoT, Smart Cities, Industry 4) within Service Science. The presentation will outline some of our main findings on the field of Smart City, focused on the comparison of academic approaches with industrial practice.

Informatics colloquium 3. 4. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 doc. JUDr. Radim Polčák, Ph.D., PrF MU Abstract: In my note, I would like to discuss some legal issues related to development and use of autonomous robots. One of obvious problems is liability. Robots do not have legal personalities, so it is questionable who and for what should be liable when a robot causes harm (physical or other - e.g. through discriminatory decisions). In real life, this issue translates mostly to compliance and modelling insurance schemes that technically define basic parameters of respective markets. In addition, I would like to briefly discuss legal barriers to use of different types of data for development or operations of robots. In that regards, we need complex legal solutions (not necessarily legislation - e.g. contractual data trusts) to overcome complicated and differentiated legal obstacles that prevent pooling and use of data from different jurisdictions within the EU and offshore.

Informatics colloquium 27. 3. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Ing. Vlad Popovici, M.Sc., Ph.D., PřF MU Abstract: High throughput genomic revolution started almost twenty years ago with the first in-house printed DNA chips. Since then, various technologies evolved, allowing the interrogation of the whole (human) genome, proteome, metabolome, etc., all producing large amounts of data. Bioinformatics tools and methods evolved to account for all these data modalities with the current bottleneck being the integration of these perspectives into a more comprehensive picture. In parallel and completely independent of bioinformatics, digital pathology also witnessed significant advances fuelled mostly by technological developments: slide scanners and computational infrastructure. However, both “classical” bioinformatics and digital pathology/bioimaging are often used to investigate the same biological phenomenon. It is, therefore, natural to attempt to combine these two seemingly incompatible fields with the hope of unveiling new connections between them. In this talk we will look at three examples of jointly mining the transcriptome and the histopathology images in the context of breast and colon cancers. We will also discuss the computational challenges one faces when working with these data.

Informatics colloquium 20. 3. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 RNDr. Vladimír Ulman, Ph.D., FI MU Abstract: The present biomedical research increasingly relies on automated processing and analysis of large amount of image data. Two fundamental tasks in this area are automated cell segmentation and tracking. The task of cell segmentation is to split the image into several disjoint regions, each accurately outlining every single cell. The task of cell tracking is to link together the regions that represent the same cell in a time-lapse image sequence. This allows for time-resolved quantitative description of events and changes in displayed cell behaviour. Needless to say, the accuracy of the two tasks influences accuracy of the consequent biological analysis. This talk will be focused on ways to evaluate performance quality of segmentation and tracking algorithms. In particular, I will review the evaluation protocol implemented in the Cell Tracking Challenge, an international benchmarking initiative that FI MU is part of, and identify current challenges in the field. Last but not least, I will give an outlook on a artificial image synthesis, which I see as a prospective way to foster the future development in the field.

Informatics colloquium 13. 3. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Atreyee Sinha, Ph.D., Computing & Information Sciences Department, Edgewood College, Madison, USA Abstract: Image classification is one of the most important Computer Vision problems being addressed by researchers around the world today. Classification is the task of labelling images with different predefined category labels. These category labels may be based on some low-level features such as color, texture or shape, but more often, they are based on high-level features such as semantic description, activity or objects present. In this talk, I will present the different techniques and recent advances in image classification and retrieval with particular examples from different applications.

Informatics colloquium 6. 3. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 RNDr. Robert Ganian, Ph.D., Algorithms and Complexity Group, TU Wien Backdoors to Tractability for Constraint Satisfaction Abstract: Constraint Satisfaction (CSP) is one of the most studied NP-complete problems, with numerous applications in both theory and practice and featuring its own dedicated conference. A significant amount of research has targeted the identification of classes of CSP instances which are polynomially tractable; this has led to celebrated results such as Schaefer's Dichotomy Theorem and Bulatov's recent proof of the Feder-Vardi Dichotomy Conjecture. Such classes of instances are often called "islands of tractability". In this talk, we will present techniques and recent developments on solving CSP instances that lie outside of an island of tractability. In particular, we will use the notion of "backdoors" to capture the distance of an instance from an island of tractability and show how these backdoors can be exploited to obtain algorithms for CSP with good runtime guarantees.

Informatics colloquium 27. 2. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 asst. prof. Dimitris Sacharidis, Ph.D., Institute of Information Systems Engineering, TU Wien Managing and Analyzing Big Geo-Social Data Abstract: The widespread adoption of online social networks and location-aware mobile devices has resulted in a continuously increasing amount of published user-generated, geo-tagged content. Typical examples include tweets, check-ins, photo/video uploads, route posts (e.g., taxi rides, running trails). This big geo-social data essentially captures people's everyday interactions between the physical and digital world, and presents immense opportunities for creating added value to domains such as location-based services, smart cities, tourism. In this talk, we will present methods for efficiently handling and effectively analyzing large amounts of such data.

Informatics colloquium 20. 2. 2018, 14:00 lecture hall D2 ao. Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Renate Motschnig, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna Transforming Communication in Leadership and Teamwork – Why should computer scientists care? Abstract: Numerous sources report that the major reason for ICT-project failure are people- rather than technical issues. Thus, in order to improve project success, the most evident thing to do seems to care about the human factor in ICT projects. This influential “soft”, “fuzzy”, and “complex” factor, however, has tended to be overlooked, such that a number of research gaps at the interface between software engineering and human sciences became apparent and need to be filled. In this talk, my objective is to raise awareness of the salience of communication issues in ICT projects and illustrate, what can be done (or what computer scientists, in particular, can do) scientifically and practically, to fill the research/practice gaps and concurrently improve communication, leadership, and teamwork in ICT projects.

Do not miss the unique opportunity to hear prof. Král, leading world-wide expert in the field of discrete mathematics and algorithms. Daniel Král' is a professor of matematics and informatics at University of Warwick. For his work he received many important awards such as European Prize in Combinatorics 2011 or Philip Leverhulme Prize in Mathematics and Statistics in 2014. He is also one of two Czech scientists who received ERC grant more than once. Lecture "Models of large networks" will be given in English. The lecture will take place on Friday, February 16, 2018 at 11 am in the D3 lecture hall.

Masaryk University Rector's Award 2018

Informatics colloquium 19. 12. 2017, 14:00 lecture hall D2 prof. Stefan Bruckner, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Bergen Navigating the Space of Visualizations Anstract: Considering the vast amounts of data involved in many scientific disciplines and industrial applications, it is essential to provide effective and efficient means for forming a mental model of the underlying phenomenon. The term "visualization" refers to the process of extracting meaningful information from data and constructing a visual representation of this information. While the concept of using images to communicate complex phenomena of course predates the development of digital technology by millennia, over the past decades the field of visualization has firmly established itself as an important and constantly expanding discipline within computer science. Computer-based Visualization seeks to provide interactive graphical data representations, taking advantage of the extraordinary capability of the human brain to process visual information. Advanced visualization methods now play an an important role in the exploration, analysis, and presentation of data in many fields such as medicine, biology, geology, or engineering. This development, however, has also lead to the fact that there is now a vast number of often very specialized techniques to visualize different types of data tailored towards specific tasks. For non-experts it becomes non-trivial to choose appropriate methods that will provide the optimal answers to their questions. In this talk, I will discuss previous and ongoing research on how we can explore and navigate the space of visualizations itself. By consider the interplay between data, visualization algorithms, their parameters, perception, and cognition as a complex phenomenon that deserves study in its own right, we are making progress in providing goal-oriented interfaces for visual analysis. For instance, we can make the modification of input parameters of visualization algorithms more intuitive by normalizing their perceived effects over the entire value range, and provide visual guidance about their influence. Furthermore, by incorporating additional knowledge into the visualization process, we can infer information about the goals of a user, and develop smarter systems that automatically suggest appropriate visualization techniques. This line of investigation leads us along the path towards a new type of visual data science, where automated data analysis approaches such as deep learning are tightly coupled with interactive visualization techniques to exploit their complementary advantages for knowledge discovery in data-driven science. Short biography: Stefan Bruckner is professor in visualization at the Department of Informatics of the University of Bergen, Norway. Prior to his appointment in Bergen, he was an assistant professor at the TU Wien, Austria where he also received his habilitation (2012) and PhD (2008). His research focuses on interactive visualization and he has made important contributions to several areas such as illustrative methods, parameter space exploration, feature detection, and knowledge-based interfaces. Prof. Bruckner has successfully led several research projects including industry collaborations with partners such as AGFA HealthCare and GE Healthcare. His results were published in the premier venues for visualization research and have to date received 8 best paper awards and honorable mentions at international events. He won the Karl-Heinz-Höhne Award for Medical Visualization and received the prestigious Eurographics Young Researcher Award. As an active member of the international scientific community, Prof. Bruckner regularly serves on the program committees of the leading conferences in visualization and computer graphics. He was program co-chair of EuroVis, PacificVis, VCBM, and the Eurographics Medical Prize, and currently serves on the editorial board of Computers & Graphics. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, ACM SIGGRAPH, and Eurographics.

Informatics colloquium 12. 12. 2017, 14:00 lecture hall D2 RNDr. Petr Švenda, Ph.D., FI MU Troubles with RSA cryptographic keypair generation Abstract: The talk will cover our recent work [1] which resulted in the discovery of an algorithmic flaw in the construction of primes for RSA key generation in a widely-used library of a major manufacturer of cryptographic hardware. The primes generated by the library suffer from an entropy loss so severe, that practical factorization of commonly used key lengths up to 2048 bits is possible. Our method based on an extension of Coppersmith’s factorization attack requires no additional information except for the value of the public modulus and does not depend on a weak or a faulty random number generator. The library in question is found in NIST FIPS 140-2 and CC EAL 5+ certified devices used for a wide range of real-world applications, including citizens identity cards, Trusted Platform Modules, secure email, and tokens for authentication or software signing. The findings directly resulted in the revocation of millions of certificates in Estonia, Slovakia, Spain and other countries and major security update rolled by Microsoft, Google, HP, Lenovo, and others. The talk will discuss how the vulnerability was found, what was the root cause for its existence, our experience from the responsible disclosure process and the options how to systematically prevent such a large-scale failure in the future. [1] Matus Nemec, Marek Sys, Petr Svenda, Dusan Klinec and Vashek Matyas: The Return of Coppersmith's Attack: Practical Factorization of Widely Used RSA Moduli, 24th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'2017), 2017.

Informatics colloquium 5. 12. 2017, 14:00 lecture hall D2 doc. RNDr. Tomáš Brázdil, Ph.D., FI MU Mastering games with deep learning Abstract: The main theme of the talk is how much a deep learning agent could learn by playing games against itself. I will start with a historical overview of TD-Gammon, a famous algorithm for playing backgammon at expert level. In the main part I will concentrate on the very recent algorithms for playing Go above master level. I will give an overview of fundamental methods, namely deep reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo tree search. Finally, I will comment on new directions in the area, especially the Starcraft II challenge in which the current algorithms still fail to deliver convincing results.

Informatics colloquium 28. 11. 2017, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Univ.-Prof. Dr. Uwe Zdun, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna Software Architectures and Techniques for Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Abstract: IT compliance means in general complying to regulations that apply to an IT system. There are many other rules and constraints in a software system that have characteristics similar to IT compliance rules stemming from regulations, including security policies, business rules, QoS rules, deployment rules, and even architecture conformance rules. In this talk, we discuss software architectures and techniques for automated compliance monitoring and enforcement. Goals are to enhance the automation in compliance controls and make compliance controls easier to implement, reuse, and change - and thus less costly. We will discuss different categories of compliance checking techniques, like those that check at design time, runtime, or after runtime, and those that are primarily focussed on structures or behaviors. Further we discuss the need and techniques for involving domain experts more closely, as well as semi-automatic guidance for control definition, monitoring, and enforcement.

Informatics colloquium 21. 11. 2017, 14:00 lecture hall D2 RNDr. Martin Maška, Ph.D., FI MU Segmentation and Tracking of Spiky Cells Abstract: To monitor their surroundings and to promote their movement, motile cells protrude spikes. Although modern fluorescence microscopy allows us to observe spiky cells at unprecedented spatio-temporal resolutions, a fully 3D image analysis approach to automatically quantifying the behavior of spikes is still lacking. In this talk, we briefly explain crucial aspects of such a quantitative task and present our recent advances in the field, demonstrating how convolutional neural networks combined with realistic computer-generated image data help to increase segmentation and tracking performance beyond that of traditional image analysis approaches without machine learning.

Juraj Hromkovic, professor of Information Technology and Eduation at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich since January 2004. Teaching mathematics and computer science as research instruments Abstract: We view mathematics as a language that was and is developed in order to describe what is describable in an unambiguous way (everybody mastering this language interprets each sentence in the same way) and in order to have a language in which the correctness of each argumentation is verifiable. Together with experiments mathematics became the main research instrument for discovering our world. In this talk we present the history of the development of mathematics and computer science in a concise way and recognize that the main contributions of science are not in discovering facts, but in introducing new concepts that increase the power of our research instruments. Finally, we discuss why and how we have to change our education in mathematics and science that is still living in a more than 100 years old world of technical revolution. The main idea is based on moving from teaching long time optimized and finalized products of scientific work as facts, relationships and methods to teaching the processes of the development of research instruments and of making discoveries. The main goal is to force the intellectual growth of young people, to motivate them to strive to understand and to be creative. Place: Mendelovo muzeum, Mendlovo náměstí 907/1A, Brno

The habilitation lecture Mgr. Pavel Rychlý, Ph. D. will be held on Tuesday November 3, 2015 from 10:45 in the conference room B517. Lecture title: Why we need even bigger text corpora. Abstract: The first text corpus suitable for a linguistic research was British National Corpus containing around 100 million words. Current costs of creating such corpus is only a fraction of costs at that time. There are corpora containing ones or tens of billions of words for the most-spoken languages. Many text processing tools are not able to process such amount of data effectively, that rise the question: do we really need such big corpora? In the presentation, we are going to show which applications need them. The habilitation lecture RNDr. Jan Bouda, Ph. D. will be held on Tuesday November 10, 2015 from 10:00 in the lecture room A318. Lecture title: Theoretical computer science in quantum world Abstract: Our world is controlled by the laws of quantum physics. Traditional theoretical computer science is based on classical physics, and does not describe our world in full generality. Are the results of theoretical computer science valid in the real world, or just in the Turing machine? Do information theory, computational complexity, automata, and formal languages have any real world relevance? In this talk I will try to persuade the audience that despite the highly restrictive computation and information model traditional theoretical computer science uses, many results are still valid and it is not necessary to completely abandon the research in traditional theoretical computer science The habilitation lecture Fotios Liarokapis, PhD will be held on Tuesday December 1, 2015 from 14:00 in the lecture room D2. Lecture title:Interactive Augmented Reality Environments. Abstract:Augmented reality is considered to be as one of the most promising technologies for the coming years. This talk will present augmented reality technologies for both indoor and outdoor environments. A number of novel augmented reality interfaces will be demonstrated illustrating how these technologies can be used effectively for different application domains such as archaeology, education and navigation.

Up to four post-doc positions in computer science are available at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno. The positions are initially limited to one year but can be extended to two years based on a successful evaluation after the first 8 months. The gross salary will be 2,000 EUR per month. Anticipated starting date is September 1, 2011 (can be negotiated) and preference will be given to those who can start by Autumn 2011. Applicants should have (by the starting date) a PhD in computer science or a closely related discipline and ideally will have a strong background in one of the research activities carried out at the Faculty of Informatics, namely formal methods, computer graphics and image processing, data management, large scale distributed systems and networks, security and cryptography, embedded systems, enterprise systems and services and natural language processing, for details see: here The willingness to contribute to the teaching programme of the Faculty of Informatics by means of a specialized course is welcome. The applicants should enjoy working in a team and have good communication skills. Fluency in English is required. In order to encourage mobility, the candidate cannot be considered eligible for this position if by the starting date, he or she has already worked or studied at Masaryk University for a total of 6 months or more, during the last 3 years. Candidates who did not graduate from a university in the Czech Republic will be strongly preferred. The positions are open until filled. Interested candidates are invited to apply to: Dana Komárková R&D Office Faculty of Informatics Botanicka 68a 602 00 Brno Czech Republic E-mail: research@fi.muni.cz The application should contain CV, list of publications, cover letter with statement of research interests and names and contact information of three researchers who are familiar with the applicant's work and who could provide recommendation letters if needed. Electronic submissions are highly encouraged.

Deadline for submission of proposals for students´ development and research projects is on 17th January 2010.

Masaryk University Rector opens the competition of Student Project Grant at MU in the following project categories: A. Specific research grant projects B. Student scientific conference

Masaryk University Rector opens the competition of Student Project Grant at MU n the following project categories: A. Specific research grant projects B. Student scientific conference Projects start is 1 January 2010.  

IBM Shared University Research Award 2008 was awarded to prof. Pavel Zezula for innovating project Web-scale Similarity Search in Multimedia Data. More information is in press report MU and here - some media responses.

Program of the meeting: Habilitation procedure 10,00 - RNDr. Tomáš Pitner, Ph.D. - Web-Based Services For Technology-Enhanced Learning, title of habilitation lecture "Web 2.0 Concepts, Applications, and Open Problems 11.00 - RNDr.. Petr Sojka, Ph.D. - From Pixels to Minds and Back; title of habilitation lecture "From the Minds Pixels and Back." 12.00 - 12.15 break 12.15 - RNDr. Eva Hladká, Ph.D. - Multimedia Data Distribution and Processing; title of habilitation lecture "Active element for data distribution" 13.15 - RNDr. Aleš Horák, Ph.D. - Computer Processing of Czech and Syntax Semantics; title of habilitation lecture "Computer processing of the Czech syntax and semantics " Professorship procedure 14.15 - doc. RNDr. Luděk Matyska, CSc. - title of lecture "Usable Distributed Systems". All are invited.

The Newton International Fellowship scheme will select the very best early stage post-doctoral researchers from all over the world, and offer support for two years at UK research institutions. The Fellowships cover the broad range of natural and social sciences, engineering and the humanities. They provide grants of £24,000 per annum to cover subsistence and £8,000 to cover research expenses, plus a one-off relocation allowance of £2,000. As part of the scheme, all Newton Fellows who remain in research will be granted a 10 year follow-up funding package worth £6,000 per annum. Application deadline is August 4, 2008. More information at: www.newtonfellowships.org