News and events archive

A screening of the October performance of prof. Donald Knuth's multimedia oratorium Fantasia Apocalyptica will take place on December 18, 18:18 in the D3 lecture room at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University.

Noga Alon is an Israeli mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Princeton University noted for his contributions to combinatorics and theoretical computer science, having authored hundreds of papers. He is also a Baumritter Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Computer Science at Tel Aviv University. He received his Ph. D. in Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983 and had visiting positions in various research institutes including MIT, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, IBM Almaden Research Center, Bell Laboratories, Bellcore and Microsoft Research (Redmond and Israel). His research interests are mainly in Combinatorics, Graph Theory and their applications in Theoretical Computer Science. His main contributions include the study of expander graphs and their applications, the investigation of derandomization techniques, the foundation of streaming algorithms, the development and applications of algebraic and probabilistic methods in Discrete Mathematics and the study of problems in Information Theory, Combinatorial Geometry and Combinatorial Number Theory. Noga Alon has received a number of awards, including the Erdős Prize in 1989, the Pólya Prize in 2000, the Landau Prize in 2005, the Gödel Prize in 2005, the Israel Prize, for mathematics in 2008, and the EMET Prize in 2011. He has been a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1997, he was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2017. Abstract The list chromatic number of a graph G is the minimum k so that for every assignment of a list of k colors to any vertex of G there is a vertex coloring assigning to each vertex a color from its list so that adjacent vertices get distinct colors. This notion was introduced by Vizing and by Erdős, Rubin and Taylor in the late 70s and its study combines combinatorial, probabilistic and algebraic techniques. Its natural extension to hypergraphs is closely related to questions in Euclidean Ramsey Theory. I will discuss several old and new problems and results in the area focusing on a recent work with Briceno, Chandgotia, Magazinov and Spinka motivated by questions in statistical physics regarding vertex colorings of the d-dimensional lattice. When? 18 December 2019, 4:30 PM Where? Mendel Museum's Augustinian Abbey Refectory at Mendel Square

We cordially invite you to the opening of an exhibition of student projects of the subject Generative Design Programming PV259. The event will take place in the foyer of the Faculty of Informatics of MU. Organizer: the Studio of Graphic Design and Multimedia.

Informatics Colloquium 17.12. 2019, 14:00 lecture hall D2 Marek-Martin Matyska, Senior Game Designer at Geewa, Praha Game Development & Why should University Care Abstract: Introduction to Game Development and its massive growth, what kind of problems we are encountering, and why it can be an opportunity for Universities and Students alike.

RNDr. Vlasta Šťavová On selected end-user issues in usable security 4. 12. 2019, od 8:30 meeting room B 517 RNDr. Katarína Furmanová Visualization and Visual Analysis of Intermolecular Interactions of Proteins 16. 12. 2019, od 9:30 meeting room B 517 Open for public.

Where there’s a will there's a way: Blind software programmer Vojtěch Polášek graduated with honors and kick-started his full-time career in Red Hat Vojta was born visually impaired. At the age of 11 he had an accident and through following several years lost his sight almost completely. Against all odds, he graduated with honours at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, got the Dean's award for his Bachelor and Diploma theses. His diploma thesis has even been nominated by the faculty to prestigious Czech and Slovak IT SPY competition evaluating IT diploma theses and was currently selected among 8 best finalists. Recently, Vojta has joined Red Hat and kick-started his career in the Security Compliance team. He's basically living the same kind of life as everyone else. All thanks to his positivity, courage, and enthusiasm. He tries not to ever look back on his blindness and show society and other disabled people that being blind doesn't have to be an obstacle.  In collaboration with Red Hat we had the opportunity to interview him to learn more. Let's start with a warm-up question: When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grow up? [Vojta]: An astronaut, of course! (chuckles). Once upon a time, when I was about 5 years old, my father brought home our first computer and from that moment I knew that I'll devote my career to computers and I haven't stopped hanging around them ever since. Besides, I have  been playing the piano for a long time. During my studies in high school I was also bouncing around ideas to study psychology but eventually computers won. However, I wasn't sure which specific area  I want to focus on so I started experimenting with hacking and that was the moment I decided to go down the ‘security road’. So how did you actually get to the programming? [Vojta]: The first thing I did was my own website. There wasn't such a thing as Wordpress or other content management systems available back then so I started with HTML. The problem is that creating a website goes hand in hand with web design, which was obviously something I was not able to deal with so I started with programming from simple Timer to games for visually impaired people. https://github.com/vojtapolasek/united_guards. When I started university, there wasn't much time left for my own initiatives and experiments as I had to devote most of the time to various projects which were part of my studies. How did your student life differ from other students? [Vojta]: I studied at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University https://www.fi.muni.cz/. As far as my disability is concerned, Masaryk University belongs to the absolute top for students with special needs, especially thanks to the Teiresias support center, https://www.teiresias.muni.cz/ : Their goal is to provide maximum accessibility to all accredited degree programs at the university for students with various types of disabilities. Thanks to them I could study the same program as other ‘normal’ students which is amazing. Teiresias has its own building and classrooms with their own equipment. My studies were different primarily due to length. A good example was math: known as one of the most difficult subjects at FI and it usually consists of seminars and lectures including writing on the whiteboard which is obviously something I am not able to do. So I got an individual study plan, individual lector, modified materials in electronic form and extra lessons. Consequently, what takes ‘normal students’ one semester, I studied for two but in the end, I was able to pass the  exam like anyone else. Was there any subject which you simply couldn't study? [Vojta]: Not really, but if I chose for instance graphic design that would be obviously... nonsense. Anyway, most of the time it‘s more about the will, attitude, and negotiation.  A great example is the Cisco networking course I applied for. The course is optional, but very interesting and not many students apply for it. I was told this course is not really suitable for me but I didn't get discouraged easily: I asked for reasons why not. And then? We found a way eventually! However, the only serious problem I experienced was the lack of lecturers for individual studies. That's amazing! Let‘s stick with your student life for a while: We heard that you received Dean‘s award for both the bachelor degree and also for a diploma thesis. That's pretty impressive! Can you briefly introduce us to the topic of your diploma thesis? [Vojta]: The Deans award? To be honest, that was a surprise even for me. My advisor Milan Brož proposed a nomination for the Dean's award during the defense of the diploma thesis. In simple words, I was dealing with key derivation functions that transform a password into a cryptographic key because ordinary passwords are not always suitable for encryption software. I was analyzing a relatively new function called Argon2 which was designed to make to the process of cracking harder and slower because password cracking has evolved and gotten way faster thanks to the usage of graphic cards and specialized HW. Simply put, this function should force hackers to be able to crack passwords only as fast as common users so they don't have any ‘advantage’ over them. My job was basically to simulate an attack and compare Argon2 with PBKDF2. The attack was devised through CPUs and GPUs using high-performance hardware provided by MetaCentrum VO and I was testing how long  it takes to crack the function. The result of this test was a price model for an attacker using either physical hardware or on-demand allocation of computing resources in the cloud. It turned out that it can easily reach millions or even billions of dollars. What was the most interesting finding from your thesis? [Vojta]: Well, it was quite intriguing that from a long-term perspective it does not really pay to rent space in the cloud in comparison with buying computers directly for hackers. You have also mentioned your advisor Milan Brož who is working for Red Hat and is a kind of ambassador for MUNI. Can you tell us about him in the role of adviser? How was it? [Vojta]: Milan's approach was fantastic. He was absolutely honest with me. He was like: ‘It's your thesis, not mine.’ or ‘It's you who will defend it, not me.’ In my opinion, an advisor should be someone who is providing guidance and advice rather than pushing and urging students. Cooperation with him was based on reciprocity: as long as I was proactive Milan behave the same way and he was very open to my ideas and initiatives. I am aware that a large part of the success of the thesis belongs to him. It was honestly pleasure being led by Milan. What are you currently doing in Red Hat? What is your role? [Vojta]: Roles in our team are not fixed so it‘s hard to predict my future role. Currently I am part of Security compliance team working on OpenSCAP which is upstream tool for maintaining security compliance  for enterprise systems and I'm responsible for creating content for this tool. This role involves an interesting mix between programming and scripting and also a little bit of system administration which I really enjoy. Was there any obstacle you had to face at work? [Vojta]: Coffee machines are tricky! These modern devices have touch screens but that‘s not that big deal indeed. It‘s not that hard to find the way in a building. One just has to learn where meeting rooms are and then it's easy. There are only tiny obstacles like technical issues for example with some software, like Jira. I have mentioned already during my interview that problems like this might occur. It‘s a problem though but luckily I don't need to use it that much. So overall it‘s good. And what about your plans for the future? Do you have any? [Vojta]: One thing is for sure: I would like to stay in the IT field. Ideally in Security and hopefully in Red Hat. And outside of my career life, I would like to start a family at some point, but it's all in the stars.

Sir Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge and Daniel Kráľ, a computer scientist and mathematician at the Faculty of Informatics MU, are seeking to change the current system of publishing scientific results. The traditional route of publishing scientific results in printed journals is funded by subscribers, most of which comprise university libraries. One may access online versions of articles via the web portals of publishers, however, to do so, it is first necessary to purchase a subscription. These considerable subscription fees, which are typically in the range of hundreds of dollars for a single issue of a journal published by a large commercial publisher, generate significant profits for commercial publishers, usually in the range between 20% and 40% of their revenue. Moreover, this model of publishing restricts the access of articles only to those who subscribe to the journal, impeding the free access of information to the wider scientific community. In 2012, Gowers founded the boycott initiative Elsevier, which resulted in a discussion on open access publishing: a model of publishing scientific results in such a way that they are available to the entire scientific community free of charge. However, open access publishing can be done in various ways: the most well-known are the Green and Golden Routes. The Green Route means that authors can store a version of their article in a public repository (in computer science, mathematics and physics, it is standard to use the arXiv repository - https://arxiv.org/).  This version is freely accessible but the published manuscript itself is not. The Green Route is not considered to comply with open access requirements by some funding bodies. The Golden Route means that authors will pay an additional publication fee for making their article freely available in an online version of the journal. These fees, which are in the order of thousands of dollars per article, form another source of income for traditional publishing houses. In 2018, Science Europe, an association of European science foundations, announced the so-called Plan S initiative, that would see most results required to be published in an open-access way. However, the Golden Route would impose additional costs for research institutions in the form of publication fees, while the funding spent on publication fees could be better used for scientific work. It is worth noting that editors and reviewers usually provide their services free of charge to commercial publishers. The Diamond Route of open access publishing is an alternative to the Golden Route promoted by a part of the scientific community, to the displeasure of some commercial publishers.The Diamond Route means that journals do not charge any fees from neither the authors nor the readers, or their fees are merely symbolic (in the order of tens of dollars) in order to cover the necessary costs. In June 2018, Professor Daniel Kráľ from the Faculty of Informatics of Masaryk University, together with Professor Timothy Gowers from Cambridge University founded a new journal, Advances in Combinatorics. The journal should serve as a Diamond Route open-access alternative for top quality research journals in combinatorics (such as Combinatorica), which are currently published by commercial publishers. The first issue of Advances in Combinatorics has just appeared - https://www.advancesincombinatorics.com/articles. The quality of published manuscripts is very high - many deal with well-known and long-standing open problems. The editorial team led by Professors Gowers and Kráľ is looking forward to other similarly high-quality contributions that will appear in the next issue of the journal in the near future. Advances in Combinatorics functions as an overlay journal. All articles submitted to an overlay journal undergo a rigorous review process, and the final version of the accepted publication is stored in a freely accessible repository with a link from the journal website. In the case of Advances in Combinatorics, this repository is arXiv. All journal articles are also assigned DOI, a globally used identifier for digital objects (such as electronic versions of manuscripts). The cost of running the journal, which is in the order of tens of dollars per article, is covered by Queen's University Library. This Canadian university is a long time supporter of open access publishing. The vision of the editors is that other high quality journals could be inspired by the Diamond Route open-access publishing model of Advances in Combinatorics and its sister journal Discrete Analysis. Expanding publishing in the form of a Diamond Route open-access would save high costs related to scientific publishing, with the saved funding directed to scientific work instead.  We are proud that one of  our professors at the Faculty of Informatics of Masaryk University is one of the two managing editors of the journal.