“I can only speak for artificial intelligence – but in many of its sub-areas the Czech Republic ranks first in Europe,” says Josef Šivic, a world-renowned scientist. After 15 years working in prestigious universities and technology giants abroad, he returned home to Prague, where he works at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics.
„If we count articles in prestigious journals only for CTU, we are among the top five in Europe, in robotics and computer learning somewhere in the top seven or eight. So we are doing very well,“ the scientist says.
Šivic is working on several projects with his and other teams: Machine learning robots in factories or biomedicine, and they are also working on an improved drug to dissolve blood clots with the help of AI.
„With Alzheimer’s disease, for example, we don’t yet understand exactly everything, some of the mechanisms of the disease are partly understood, but the goal is to understand the molecular basis of the disease. Artificial intelligence is developing tools, also for other diseases, that will enable us to speed up our scientific work,“ he says of the project, which he is working on with Jiří Damborský’s team from MUNI in Brno.
„An analysis that took months can be done in minutes, while a simulation that took hours or days can be done in a tenth of a second. All with the help of machine learning.“
Already today, people are using AI, especially language models. „There are already other tools emerging that can do searches on specified research, so when they search for articles on a specified topic. That’s also a big revolution in research that’s still in its infancy, but it has a lot of potential and, again, offers mainly in acceleration,“ he explains.
„Artificial intelligence is sometimes likened to electricity, which has allowed us to amplify, that is, to accentuate our power, the possibilities of doing physical work. But what’s interesting about AI is that it also enhances our ability to process information. So we will soon see accelerated advances in other scientific fields that may lead to breakthroughs. By that I mean fields like physics, biology, chemistry,“ he muses.
According to the scientist, it’s clear that the AI models currently in use need a lot of power to work at all, but he says that’s also already being worked on and we’ll soon see a change there as well.
