PRESS RELEASE

More than fifty works were gathered in the final part of the Excel@FIT student conference, which was organized for the seventh time by the BUT Faculty of Information Technology on Thursday. FIT students presented their works, which were selected for the final part by a board composed of experts from the academic and commercial sphere. The faculty distributed 160,000 crowns among the best.

Web applications, data processing, security or neural networks. These are just some of the topics addressed at the Excel@FIT online conference on Thursday. It has traditionally tried to present the best practical solutions for IT students. "It is a space where students can present their work and inspire each other with their projects. At the same time, they have the opportunity to get feedback not only from academics, but also from industry experts. The interest in participating in this year's event, which had to take place online for the second time, and especially the quality of the work, surprised us very nicely," Milan Češka, the Executive Chairman of the Excel@FIT Board, said.

One of the projects that the Board appreciated is a system for automatic evaluation of sport target shooting. Its author is the FIT student Jana Gregorová, who shoots herself. During the training, she was annoyed that she did not see the result immediately after the shot. "It serves as feedback if I'm standing properly, holding a pistol, concentrating, etc. I've always had to get to the target, and it's not always possible immediately, because usually more shooters shoot nearby, and under this condition entering the shooting range is prohibited," Jana Gregorová explains. Therefore, she created a solution that records and evaluates shooting. It can be used by individuals, but can also be assembled directly into the shooting range.

"It works by connecting the camera to a computer via USB or wirelessly via RTSP. The video from this camera is processed by an application on a computer and the shooter can see his/her score and highlighted hits during the shooting. After its completion, the shooter will see the evaluation and the total score. In addition, the shooter can view the target at different times of shooting and see how he/she shot in time," Jana Gregorová describes. As she adds, she has a lot of other ambitions with her work. In the future, for example, she would like to create a smartphone application for individuals, so that there is no need to take a computer with you to the shooting range, or to improve a number of functionalities.

Among the other winners is Filip Kočica. He developed a tool that could help warehouses with their performance in the future. "It's easy to use, so logistics managers, for example, can work with it without any problems, without in-depth IT knowledge. It can simulate how a given warehouse works, and at the same time design an optimization that can lead to twice the number of processed orders," Filip Kočica said. The tool, which can find the correct distribution of products in the warehouse and the shortest possible order way, was developed in cooperation with a Brno company that deals with warehouse automation. And he hopes it will find real use in practice, or at least initiate further direction in the development of warehouses.

Pop-ups and banners that require consent to the processing of personal data annoy most people on the web. The solution was brought by Aleš Postulka. The web browser extension he created gives the site consent automatically. "In the extension settings, the user can preset consent or disagreement with the individual purposes of personal data processing. When visiting the website, the extension will try to force it on this page so that the user does not have to click on the consent manually here,“ Aleš Postulka describes. He wants to continue working on developing extensions for web browsers, the current solution is currently available in the Firefox add-on store.

Flower biometrics site

Security and neural networks were also major topics. In his work, Ľuboš Mjachky focused on whether it is possible to replace biometric data, specifically images of faces, with completely different objects: for example, images of flowers or shoes. "In this work I show how it is possible to use a neural network to transform a face into flowers, which can then be used to log in to various systems instead of a real face," Ľuboš Mjachky described.

Why even use a neural network that you may have on your mobile phone to confuse your face with another picture? "It's about user security and privacy. The server does not know the real face of the user and the attacker does not have the opportunity to reconstruct his/her face. In the event of an attack, even if the mobile phone is stolen, the real identity of the user will not be known," Mjachky explained. According to him, this solution can be used in systems that require face login, but research is still in its infancy and will need to be tested.

Anton Firc focused on the security of voice biometrics in his work. He examined the great threat posed by synthetic speech, the so-called deepfake, to systems secured by the user's voice. Today, they are used, for example, by call centres in banks or mobile operators. "It is clear from the results of my work that it will be necessary to actively address this topic. The tested systems accepted synthetic speech as true. However, the results also showed that with the right setup of the biometric system, it is possible to mitigate the threats posed by synthetic speech," Anton Firc said. He adds that techniques for creating deepfakes are still relatively new and their safety implications and usability have not been fully explored. He would like to deal with them himself in the doctoral study, which he is preparing for.

The expert panel appreciated a total of eighteen student works. A total of five projects won the Jiří Kunovský Award, which was decided by the public by voting on the Internet with more than two thousand votes. Other seven awards were also given by industry partners. The awarded authors received scholarships for a total of 160 thousand crowns. You can find the results and examples of the works on the conference website.