Reports

Questions about breathing of a person trapped in an avalanche or how quickly oxygen is lost are being investigated at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at CTU by a team of scientists from the Department of Biomedical Technology in cooperation with the Faculty of Physical Education and Sport at the Charles University and the Czech Army. Within the avalanche research, they focus on breathing of victims under the snow.

There are several large-scale international evaluations that compare world universities, using different methodologies to measure higher education institutions. The CTU in Prague is ranked higher or lower in these evaluations, but it perceives the QS as a standard, especially for reasons of quality, reputation, quotations and number of students. QS World Rankings compares thousands of world universities based on criteria such as the academic reputation of the workplace and its staff, the number of quotes or the number of local and foreign students. The Czech universities were placed as follows: 317. Charles University, 531-540. Czech Technical University in Prague, 571-580. Masaryk University and 651th - 700th. Brno University of Technology and Palacký University.

The international team from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague and Delft University of Technology won in the competition announced by Taxify and Robotex International 2018 in spring of this year. The task was to optimize the operation of the fleet of passenger service vehicles. The competition teams had to design a dispatching algorithm for a simulated fleet of autonomous taxi vehicles in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. A successful algorithm had to maximize reward for transported passengers, while respecting various constraints that simulate actual operating conditions. The winning solution was then awarded a prize of € 4,000.

At the end of 2018, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic approved one of the largest projects of the Czech Technical University in Prague: Center of Advanced Applied Sciences (CAAS). The main objectives of the project led by the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering include the integration of basic and oriented research in various scientific disciplines and the creation of an effective environment for interdisciplinary research.

Following the facelift of the 15T ForCity tram, scientists from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering conducted a pilot test of the availability of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), GPS, Galileo and Glonass. This technology could be used, for example, in ongoing projects of the Prague Public Transportation Company: an anti-collision system, an electronic map of Prague, online information for passengers on the movement of individual trams in Prague or the central control system of Prague's public transport.

On 30 November, the representatives of the CTU in Prague and the Czech subsidiary of the Swedish armaments company BAE Systems have signed a memorandum of cooperation on the cybernetic protection of infantry combat vehicles. Collaboration is supposed to contribute to the development of vehicle technologies. BAE Systems is one of the four companies to address the Department of Defense for a contract for 210 tracked combat vehicles for about 53 billion crowns.

Petr Váňa from the Department of Computer Science, Robert Pěnička and scientist Vojtěch Vonásek of the Department of Cybernetics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering took part in a developer contest organized by the technology company Kiwi.com in October, during which they had to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem. Their job was to design an algorithm that would offer the cheapest air connections between the selected areas. The trio has succeeded in the international competition of more than 500 teams of 50 nationalities with 8697 issued solutions.

An international team led by Czech scientists has demonstrated that one of the basic natural principles is also involved in emergence of epileptic seizures. Revealing the existence of the so-called critical deceleration principle in the epileptic brain assumes that the seizure is preceded by a gradual loss of stability and resistance of the brain, which becomes more prone to the onset of seizures. The results obtained provide important insights into understanding the mechanisms of seizure formation, opens up space to explain the impact of many other epileptic events, and unify the current - often contradictory - theory of seizure. The results of the research bring new possibilities to explain the causes of loss of brain stability, to develop seizure risk prediction techniques, to adjust treatment depending on the rate of seizure risk, or to increase the effectiveness of healing brain stimulation. Researchers at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, the Institute of Physiology at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, in cooperation with colleagues from the Institute of Computer Science of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the Second Faculty of Medicine of the Charles University and colleagues from foreign universities in Melbourne, Oxford and Birmingham have demonstrated on experimental models and real-world patients that detectable changes in brain activity can precede an epileptic seizure.

The Alquist team, made up of students of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the Faculty of Information Technology, took the second place in the finals of the prestigious Alex Prize Competition on Best Conversational Artificial Intelligence, organized by the American giant Amazon. For the second time, it was the only team from a non-English-speaking country that made it to the final round. The aim of the competition is to develop an artificial intelligence for Amazon Alexa, capable of chatting with people on popular topics such as movies, sports or music. The competition was attended by leading universities from around the world. Moreover, the Czechs again advanced from the first place in semifinal. The results were announced at Re: Invent 2018 on Monday 26 November in Las Vegas in the evening, local time. The team, headed by Jan Šedivý from CTU-CIIRC and formed by Jan Pichl, Petr Marek, Jakub Konrad, Martin Matulík and Petr Lorenc, will come back from the USA with the $ 100,000 prize which converts to over 2 million crowns.

In the penultimate weekend of November, the CTU's sports team took part at the IVth World Interuniversity Games held in Barcelona. The opportunity to represent our university in strong competition from 3 continents, 30 countries, 76 universities and about 2,500 athletes has been revarded to 67 of our students, members of 7 sports teams. The most striking success has been achieved by our women’s basketball players who have won the first price in this important world competition. In their group, consisting of strong teams, they had defeated the Economics University of Bratislava 26:14, the Paris IESEG 29:5, the St. Petersburg Mining State University 29:10, and had lost to Cairo American University 29:32. In the quarterfinals, they had dealt with the Polytechnic University Bucharest 23:7, with the Comenius University Bratislava 23: 11 in the semifinals and then defeated the Egyptian Arab Academy AASTMT 28: 14 in the finals.