Reports

Scientists from the University Center for Energy Efficient Buildings of the Czech Technical University in Prague, in cooperation with experts from Spectrasol, have developed a new type of luminaire whose colour spectrum is very close to natural sunlight. Its usefulness is confirmed by the conclusions of the world-unique studies carried out at the Na Pražačce grammar school in Prague and, in cooperation with the National Institute of Mental Health, also at the TGM Home for the Elderly in Beroun.

Despite the unfavorable epidemiological situation, the new master's dual-degree program Smart Cities prepared in cooperation between CTU and The University of Texas at El Paso in the United States (UTEP) opened its courses for the winter semester of 2020/21. The American university is part of The University of Texas System, which brings together fourteen Texas public higher education institutes. Over 235,000 students study within this system, of which 25,000 at UTEP. UTEP belongs to the R-1 category of research institutions in the USA, ie. among 4.5% of the top American universities (out of a total of about 2,800 institutions).

GoodAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) research and development company, donated $ 24,000 from its total $ 300,000 grant fund to a group of researchers from the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, CTU. The grant will support the implementation of a project which, as both parties firmly believe, will accelerate research into artificial intelligence comparative to the human level. The project will be led by scientist Tomáš Mikolov, who led the development of popular algorithms for natural speech preprocessing - Word2vec and FastText, and has previously worked as a researcher in Facebook AI and Google Brain.

Estimating the 6D position of objects from an image is one of the key tasks for autonomous systems equipped with visual sensors. With a precisely estimated position, the robot can then grab the object and further manipulate it. As an example, you can imagine a home robotic helper that can automatically fill a dishwasher or a production robot that manipulates items on the production line based on visual inputs.

Bianka Hudáková and Kryštof Bouřil, students of the Bébarová-Nezpěváková design fundamentals studio from the Institute of Design, Faculty of Architecture, were among the fifty most successful participants in the Model Young Package 2020 international competition.

The footbridge connecting Prague's Troja borough with Císařský ostrov will be monitored online by special sensors and trackers throughout its lifetime and will continuously monitor its technical condition. As part of the pilot project, monitoring will be provided by the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague under administration of the Technical Administration of Roads of the Capital City of Prague (TSK Prague). Experts from the Department of Concrete and Masonry Structures installed the devices here together with ALIMEX employees during the construction of the footbridge, using their experience from another scientific research project on which they are working together.

The Maria Theresa Park in Prague's Hradčany is now dominated by the Maria Theresa Monument, which was ceremoniously unveiled here by representatives of Prague 6 on the occasion of the 280th anniversary of her taking rule over the Habsburg Empire. On this occasion, a visualization of the statue was created as part of a project to support tourism in Prague 6. The project was created in cooperation with the Center for Digitization and Educational Technologies (CEDET) at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, CTU (CIIRC). The main authors of the 3D visualization are brothers Michal Kotek and Martin Kotek.

CoroVent lung ventilators, which were attended by citizens and companies in a public collection this spring, are ready for delivery to Czech hospitals.

A shelter, footbridge and mast, three buildings realized by architecture students, received an honorable mention from the Grand Prix of Architects - National Architecture Awards 2020. The projects were created in the Hlaváček - Čeněk studio at the CTU Faculty of Architecture. They were awarded by a jury whose members were the partner of the Dutch MVRDV studio Fokke Moerel or the French Pritzker Prize winner Christian de Portzamparc. The announcement took place on 8 October, 2020 in the form of an online video broadcast.

Epilepsy affects about 1% of the Czech population, with conventional treatment with antiepileptics failing in one third of patients. In some cases, drug-resistant patients may undergo neurosurgery to eliminate the cause of the seizures. In multidisciplinary cooperation with doctors, biologists, mathematicians and technicians, experts from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering are developing new procedures that help identify the cause of seizures, or even plan and assist in surgery.