Werner von Siemens Awards for 2022 also went to VSB-TUO.

The award for the best graduate thesis focused on smart infrastructure and energy was given to Jan Vysocký from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (FEI) and the Centre for Energy and Environmental Technologies (CEET) at VSB-TUO.
In the competition for the best master’s thesis, Michal Procházka and his supervisor Vladimír Kašík from FEI won second place.

Jan Vysocký’s doctoral thesis, System for the Optimization of Power Distribution Network Operation, presents software that uses the latest artificial intelligence algorithms.
"The aim of the work was to create a system for managing the power distribution network to make it as efficient as possible. It ensures that voltage fluctuations across the network are minimized, local generation and storage capacities are used optimally, energy losses in the network components are kept very low, and available transmission capacities are maximized. I am pleased that this goal was achieved, and I am very happy about the award as well," said Vysocký, who works as a junior researcher at the CEET Smart Grids Laboratory.

According to his supervisor and the Director of CEET, Stanislav Mišák, the award is well deserved.
"For me, Jan is a true all-rounder in the best sense of the word. He is truly exceptional in many ways. He is an excellent programmer, has an engineer’s mindset, can work independently, and is systematic and reliable. I dare say he is a small genius," said Mišák, adding that his former doctoral student had to succeed against very strong competition.
"The evaluation committee particularly appreciated the high applicability and timeliness of his work. In times when we are addressing the energy crisis and trying to prevent energy poverty, Jan Vysocký’s work offers a fast and functional solution to achieve energy self-sufficiency and resource independence," Mišák added.

In the category Best Master’s Thesis 2022, the second place, or "silver," was awarded to Michal Procházka, who, as part of his thesis, designed and constructed a functional, four-times reduced model of a medical computed tomography (CT) scanner.
This model is now used both for educational purposes at VSB-TUO and, more importantly, for testing new real-time parallel algorithms implemented on FPGA technology for medical image processing.

"Michal approached this work with genuine enthusiasm and did not back down from any challenge. He worked completely independently, and the result speaks for itself," said the supervisor of the thesis, Vladimír Kašík.

Among the TOP 9 graduate theses on the topic of Industry 4.0, Dominik Heczko and his supervisor Zdenko Bobovský from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at VSB-TUO, and Martin Zvoník and his supervisor Petr Šimoník from FEI, made it to the list.

The expert panels selected from a total of 493 submissions, with 19 awardees sharing a prize pool of one million CZK. Of the total number of applicants, 32 percent were women, who represented 37 percent of the awardees. In terms of the number of awards, the Czech Technical University in Prague and Charles University shared the lead (with 4 awards each), followed by VSB – Technical University of Ostrava and Brno University of Technology (with 3 awards each), the Czech Academy of Sciences and Palacký University Olomouc (with 2 awards each), and Masaryk University (1 award). Since the competition began, a total of 15,300,000 CZK has been distributed among the winners.

Text author: Martina Šaradínová
Photo credit: Siemens Czech