Jan Sedmidubsky and other researchers receive "Best Short Paper Award Honorable Mention"

For the scientific article were awarded doc. Jan Sedmidubsky, Ph.D.; Tomas Rebok, Ph.D. and other authors, received the prestigious "Best Short Paper Award Honorable Mention" at the SIGIR 2023 A* Conference. Their paper "Text-to-Motion Retrieval: Towards Joint Understanding of Human Motion Data and Natural Language" was among the top three papers out of 154 accepted and 613 submitted papers (always in the given category).

You can learn more about the article in the annotation directly from one of the authors, Assoc. Thanks to recent advances in computer vision, it is possible to extract a person's movement from a regular video in the form of sequences of simplified 3D skeletons. Although automated processing of such spatio-temporal human motion data offers great application opportunities in many fields, efficient content-based access to such data remains an unsolved problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel search concept that aims to find in an unannotated database of human movements those relevant to a textual query specified in natural language. As an example, a user could enter the query "a person kneeling on the ground slowly falls on his back", which then results in the 10 most relevant database movements. In addition to defining the search concept, we have presented an implementation based on the integration of text and motion modalities, namely the BERT/CLIP language model (for encoding the text modality) and a Transformer neural network (for encoding the motion representation modality). We also presented qualitative metrics and evaluated first experiments on the recently introduced HumanML3D and KIT Motion-Language datasets. We hope that this paper will be a first step towards searching videos according to the way human movements are performed.

Winners of the MUNI Innovation Award 2023 for the Faculty of Computer Science

On 26 April 2023, the winners of the MUNI Innovation Award 2023 were announced at the MU Business Research Forum 2023, which recognises MU students and staff whose outputs have been successfully put into practice, helped to improve products or services, or contributed to the social relevance of MU research.

Zdeněk Matěj was awarded for his research on the use of computer technology and hardware systems in ionising radiation measurements in reactors, particle accelerators and particle generators. The developed systems are newly integrated into equipment that is currently deployed, for example, at the LVR-15 reactor in Řež or VR-1 in Prague at the Czech Technical University. Collaboration in these areas also includes research and development on projects with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), where the team has contributed to the refinement of effective cross-sections in nuclear data libraries thanks to these facilities.

Jan Kasprzak was awarded for his applied research focusing on technical and procedural aspects of plagiarism detection. The result of the team's work under his leadership is a technical tool for finding similarities in text documents, available within the IS MU, information systems of other universities, the national thesis archive Theses.CZ and a specialized system for detecting plagiarism in term papers Odevzdej.CZ.

Professor Daniel Kráľ became the chair of the ERC Consolidator Grant Panel Physical Sciences and Engineering: Mathematics

Professor Daniel Kráľ has been working at FI since 2018. He has been awarded the Donald Ervin Knuth Professorship at FI, which the University created courtesy of Donald Knuth. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Warwick, where he was Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science and a member of its DIMAP research centre before coming to Brno.

His professional work focuses on graph theory and related areas of mathematics and computer science. Most of his current research focuses on questions in extremal combinatorics and combinatorial limit theory, which he also addressed under the ERC Consolidator grant LADIST and the ERC Starting grant CCOSA.

Professor King has been newly appointed as Chair of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant Panel Physical Sciences and Engineering: Mathematics in the Horizon Europe Framework Programme.

From this year, he also joined the editorial board of the prestigious journals Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society and Journal of the London Mathematical Society.

Launch of 3 new EU-funded projects

In January 2023, the implementation of 2 EU-funded projects started at FI: the project "Cyber-security Excellence Hub in Estonia and South Moravia (CHESS)", implemented under the Horizon Europe Programme, call HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ACCESS-04-01, and the project "Cybersecurity Innovation Hub", implemented under the European Commission's The Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL).

In April 2023, the implementation of the project "Czech National Quantum Communication Infrastructure", which was also approved under the DIGITAL call, will start.

Launch of 15 new projects funded by national providers

In January 2023, the implementation of 15 new projects funded by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic or from MU funds under university grant schemes started at FI.

These projects focus on e.g. new strategies in multi-echo fMRI data processing, intelligent tools for planning, execution and evaluation of tabletop exercises, advanced analysis and verification for advanced software, digital research infrastructure for language technology, arts and humanities or development of data processing techniques to support search, analysis and visualisation of large datasets using artificial intelligence.

Our new projects are also aimed at engaging FI students in the international research community.