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On Thursday, June 26, 2025, the winners of the Joseph Fourier Prize received their awards. The ceremony took place at the residence of the French Embassy. Third place in the competition, along with a special award, went to Anton Firc from the Department of Intelligent Systems and the Security@FIT research group for his research in the field of cybersecurity focused on voice deepfakes. The ceremony was chaired by the French Ambassador to the Czech Republic, Mr. Stéphane Crouzat, and Jean-Marie Lehn, Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry and initiator of the event.
Anton Firc with the third place award, to his left Stéphane Crouzat, French Ambassador to the Czech Republic. | Author: Eva KořínkováThe prestigious scientific competition annually rewards doctoral students for their research work in computer science and informatics. It is organized by the French Embassy in Prague in cooperation with the company Eviden. The competition brings together the authors of the best works with a special focus on the design and use of computationally intensive algorithms and methods, simulations and modeling, or working with large volumes of data. This year again, in cooperation with IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, the mentioned special prize: access to 250,000 normalized core hours on supercomputers in Ostrava was awarded.
Anton Firc focuses on the security impacts of voice deepfakes. As he notes, it is currently a socially critical topic, though research is still in its early stages. Detecting deepfakes, which target not only companies or state institutions but increasingly individuals as well, is not easy. The basis for this detection lies in voice biometric systems based on neural networks aimed at uncovering anomalies in recordings. However, the functioning of these tools is not flawless; for example, their transparency is often questioned—in layman's terms: we don’t always know exactly what they base their decisions on.A. Firc with winners of the J. Fourier Prize: Pavel Petráček from CTU (1st place) and Zdeněk Kasner from Charles University, as well as the French ambassador S. Crouzat (far right) and Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Jean-Marie Lehn (far left). | Author: Eva KořínkováFirst place was awarded to Pavel Petráček from the Czech Technical University in Prague for his research and development of small unmanned and autonomous drones. Second place went to Zdeněk Kasner from Charles University, who works on generating text from data using neural language models.
Let us recall that doctoral students from FIT BUT have repeatedly celebrated successes in this competition in recent years. For example, last year Karel Beneš and Juraj Síč were successful, with the latter receiving first place for his research on methods using finite automata, a simple computational model with broad applications.
More information about Anton Firc’s research can be found in the interview with the awardee (in Czech language).Anton Firc with the third place award and a special prize awarded in cooperation with IT4Innovations. | Author: A. Firc archivesSource: FIT BUT