I would like to congratulate you on your still more or less new position. How does it feel after four months as the rector of CTU under your leadership?
I am convinced that they were not happy because of me, but because of the university, or rather the senate, which made such a decision: it preferred a candidate with business experience over a career professor. This is a signal that business is important to the university, that it is opening up to it more. This is how I read it.
What specifically do you mean by opening up to business?
The basis is that the university is interested in business, that it is interested in its needs and wants to be its partner. But that alone is not enough. When a university knows what scientific challenges are important for industry, but essentially only wants money from business to finance its visions, then that is encapsulation – and that is wrong.
So we all want to open up the university, but as usual, the devil is in the details. The primary reason why cooperation fails is the fact that industry and universities have different innovation horizons. When an industrial company needs to solve something, it wants to have it right away, within three months, six months at most. But universities work in completely different cycles. They solve complex research and scientific problems that will be relevant in five to ten years, and they do not meet industry in this. Then it happens that company representatives feel that the university did not help them much and that people from within the company would have done it faster in the end. And they are right.
Why couldn't qualified people at the university, who have all the materials for the project, solve the problem faster?
Because they have been qualified to solve problems for several years. They need a research team, doctoral students. Companies are certainly more qualified to solve short-term tasks.
So you want to teach people at the university to work faster?
Certainly not, I will not adapt the university to the pace of short-term tasks from industry. That does not make sense.
So, on the contrary, you will try to convince companies to think about what else useful, long-term, the university could do for them?
Exactly. Companies should want to use the university differently. For example, it can show them where research on the technologies they use is going, and allow them to adapt their technological plans to it or even skip a stage in development. This is how technologists in California with UC Berkeley and at Stanford University practice. Nobody goes to UC Berkeley with a component to have it modified, because they know that it would be a waste of the time of those people at the university. They are not concerned with the present, but with the future.
Today, companies after CTU are collaborating with Toyota on the development of machine vision for cars. CTU in technological cooperation are not students, but professors. They have some unique knowledge and the greatest benefit comes from them for companies.
Do you have any other examples of similar long-term cooperation?
The partnership with Adobe also has the character of visionary development. A group of people at the university are working with a company on computer graphics. We also have scientists here who are working with the biochemical industry.
How do you want to get more projects like this? By meeting companies and presenting CTU's capabilities. I want to create something like a marketing strategy, collecting the most interesting things that are being done at the university that could be relevant to industry, and presenting them to companies.
CTU is unique in Europe and the world in several areas. The key area is nuclear research. We have three reactors on campus, almost no one else has that. We are already working with ČEZ in the area of small modular reactors, that is a strategic direction for us. nuclear physics CTU is the hegemon in AI in the Czech Republic, we have several famous laboratories here that have been doing AI for thirty years.
What do you think they "do"?
They develop algorithms, technologies, models. Not as a custom activity, but as a research activity. Ninety percent of the work at CTU is outstanding and can it help industry?
The third major topic is defense research. Here too, we have a long tradition, there are scientists who have been working with various defense agencies and defense industry suppliers for many years. The fourth strategic direction in which we want to develop is sustainable construction. Our Faculty of Civil Engineering and the Institute of Energy-Efficient Buildings are already achieving very good results.
If companies understand what CTU could be for them, there are dozens of top people who are dedicated to artificial intelligence. It will also play an important role in industry.
So far, we are more or less only talking about the cooperation of your scientists with big industry. What about spin-offs and start-ups, is that not a topic for you?
Of course, yes, that is the second path of possible cooperation. We will support employees. CTU is not and will not be a financial investor, but it can offer legal certainty and create a suitable environment, an incubator, where it will be possible to share knowledge. We also want to attract a former start-up founder to the Vice-Rector for Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer. Nešetřil is also a former start-up founder. So we have experience and an idea of how the school should work in this direction is inherently our own. As for funding, it can be assumed that by encouraging people to start
If there are start-ups, CTU will start to be interesting for venture capital. I was recently in Munich, where they have the largest and most successful start-up incubator in Europe. It is affiliated with the Technical University and generates 140 start-ups per year, in total they take care of 650 start-ups there. That is my great role model.
We have already mentioned AI, so let's go into it in a little more detail. Do you generally agree that the advent of artificial intelligence is a dramatic intervention that will completely and forever change the job market?
Yes, the impact on the job market will be massive. In the United States, fifty percent of software engineering graduates are already unemployed. There are professions that will be spared, but most of the intellectual ones will not be. It cannot be avoided. In the Czech Republic, we do not allow this much yet, because the unemployment rate is still very low here. But in my opinion, the company should prepare employees for this so that they can retrain for the jobs of the future as soon as possible. It won't be easy.
That's one view of AI, one risk. Then there's another, and that concerns security. I know you're one of the people who warn against AI if it's not regulated. What are your concerns and what should that regulation look like?
I don't like the fact that resistance to AI regulation is becoming a political issue. It makes no sense at all. Food, medicine, car manufacturing are regulated - so why not artificial intelligence? We don't know how drugs are made, but we'll take them because they go through some regulation. Do we also not understand artificial intelligence and leave it unregulated? I would like to be sure that AI won't "tempt" us, that if I give ChatGPT to my children, for example, that it won't appear anywhere in their communication, that they should jump under the train.
Development is moving forward very quickly, doesn't AI already have a life of its own? Can it still be monitored somehow?
Yes. Because AI is not regulated, it is like being ripped off the chain and we do not know what it will do in the future. All the more so, we must do everything to be able to regulate it. The greatest risks lie in cybersecurity. The American technology company Anthropic has developed the Mythos model, which is capable of shutting down any corporation in the world, for example, dismantling Volkswagen into prime numbers. Anthropic came up with this because it is concerned that someone else, states or criminal groups, will develop such a powerful model in secret. It therefore provides it to large companies such as Microsoft or Apple so that they have at least a few months' head start and can prepare. Mythos serves as a simulator of the worst possible attacker.
So it is not AI itself that will harm us, but its misuse?
Yes. I do not think that artificial intelligence itself will "eat" us, but that AI will harm us by being misused in human hands. I do not believe that this would be the will of AI itself. At least not yet. As the world-famous British physicist Stephen Hawking said, AI may one day rebel against humans. It cannot be considered impossible, but in my opinion, we humans will harm ourselves first, through artificial intelligence. But I want to be optimistic, I think that artificial intelligence can help us in many ways. If we understand it and come up with some regulation quickly, it will work in our favor.
You work at CTU, which has a long tradition in the field of cyber security. There are departments that are engaged in examining the properties of models, detecting risks of misuse and creating algorithms and technologies that can protect us. We do such research here.
How will AI change industrial enterprises? How will it change transport? When will most vehicles on the roads be autonomous?
Ten years ago, I believed that autonomous vehicles would be commonplace today, because in a way it is a solved problem. But nothing like that has happened. This example clearly shows that technological development alone is not enough. There must also be a suitable economic climate that will allow the technologies to be deployed. But I believe that all of this will happen, even if it is a little delayed. I believe in a high degree of autonomy in production. I think that there will be an increase in "black factories", where there is no need to turn on the lights because the robots do not need to see. I think that together with Germany we should be world leaders in this. And this brings me back to the university, because without cooperation with scientists at the university, things like autonomous factories cannot be achieved.
You have been in office for four months, that is not a long time, but what has been achieved so far?
I consider it a great success that we announced the CTU program, people who studied or worked abroad, scientists, professors, Czechs, foreigners. We have about a hundred perfect candidates on the shortlist.
What do you expect from this?
First of all, reducing academic inbreeding is a fundamental problem. Czech universities are mostly built on the talent of people who studied in the Czech Republic and have experience from only one university. A quality university must bring together people who have diverse experience. And we need to increase this diversity here.
Any other success?
I have negotiated accession talks to the EuroTech Alliance which brings together the Technical University of Denmark, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology and the Technical University of Munich. The accession of CTU and half from outside the university. They are all new and came out of an open call. I think that most academics are behind me. This is not some arrogance of mine, but I proceed from the belief that I am doing the right thing and that everyone ultimately wants to do the right thing.
What would you like to achieve during your four-year term of office? Where should CTU be, be the school of first choice for both students and professors, so that CTU is useful for industry, that the number of joint projects with industry will increase exponentially, and this will also change the structure of university funding and reduce dependence on public budgets. In four years, it should already be clear that we are on a trajectory to get into the top hundred technical universities in the world. We certainly won't be there in four years, but we'll see if we're getting there. Today we're in 189th place.
One of the criteria for measuring the success of universities is the number of publications. Is that correct? How much weight do you attach to that?
The quality of a school can certainly be recognized by measurable metrics of the quality of creative work, that's indisputable. If you don't do science, research, and technical creative work, you degenerate to the level of a "fachschule". A university is supposed to bring students top-notch knowledge that it gains through its scientific work. Scientific work is the basis for further innovation. Personally, I am convinced that the success of a university lies equally in how useful it is to society, which is proportional to how much money it draws from industry, as well as in the quality of its publications.
Is there a country or university that you take as a role model?
Good examples for me are the Swiss ETH Zurich and the Technical University of Munich. We have a number of partnerships with the University of Munich and we also have a friendly relationship. But I always say that the road to Munich leads through Dresden. The Technical University of Dresden is also inspiring, among other things because it has the same post-communist history as the Czech Technical University – the difference is that the Dresden Technical University is in the top hundred, we are not.
Does it make sense to compare ourselves with top American and British universities?
I have spent a large part of my life in cooperation with the United States and I wonder what the point of such a comparison with American universities would be. I think that the Czech Technical University is most strategically positioned to succeed in that European region and carry the glory of old European technical universities such as Munich, Zurich or Imperial College London.
Prof. Ing. Pěchouček, MSc., Ph.D., studied electrical engineering at the Czech Technical University, especially electrical engineering. He participated in the establishment of the Czech Technical University, where he devoted himself to applied research in the field of artificial intelligence, robotics and industrial systems. In addition to his academic activities, he participated in the establishment of technological startups focused on artificial intelligence. These include, for example, Cognitive Security, which focused on the use of AI in the field of cybersecurity and was later acquired by Cisco Systems. Another project is Blindspot Solutions, which focuses on data analysis and machine learning applications in industry. At the same time, he collaborated with technology and industrial companies, in particular with IBM and Honeywell, where he participated in projects using AI in practice, for example in the management of complex systems and process optimization. Since February 2026, he has been the rector of the Prague Technical University.