Technika a trh

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rail transport

How to evacuate a train

or anonymize user data?

How to find the optimal positioning of passengers on a train for an effective evacuation?

How to provide user data to a third party while preserving their anonymity?

Students of the Faculty of Information

Technology of the Czech Technical University in Prague (FIT CTU) find the answer to these and other questions within

the framework of the student research

support program called Research Summer at FIT (VýLeT). Their results are also

acknowledge at international conferences. For independent research work, students receive an extraordinary scholarship

or financial reward of up to CZK 65,000

from the faculty.

VýLeT programme

The faculty supports its students in science and research every year with the VýLeT

(Trip) programme. Students work on an

independent research assignment in collaboration with a mentor, with whom they

also prepare a journal article or a paper

for a scientific conference. Students can

engage in science and research and receive an extraordinary financial reward.

The seventh year of the VýLeT 2023 programme is currently underway at FIT CTU.

The previous year successfully concluded

with 11 scholarships being awarded. One

of them was given to Juraj Kmec, a master's degree student in Knowledge Engineering, for his project Challenges in Modelling Train Evacuation using Pathfinder.

In his research supervised by Pavel Hrabák, Ph.D., Kmec dealt with problems that

engineers may encounter when modelling train evacuations in the Pathfinder simulator. The research resulted in the identification and analysis of key factors that

have a significant impact on the evacuation

process. The resulting scientific paper was

accepted at the International Fire and Evacuation Modeling Technical Conference

(FEMTC).

"The modelling was based on data collected during an experimental evacuation

of a CityElefant train in 2018 organised by

the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the

Czech Technical University as part of fire

safety research. My contribution consisted mainly in automating the simulation

process with an emphasis on controlling

individual sources of randomness (passenger characteristics, initial deployment

of passengers, etc.) and analysing the effects of randomness on the total evacuation time depending on several types and

widths of exit," says Juraj Kmec about his

research.

As the project was comprehensively focused on confined spaces, it can be assumed that the results will also be applicable to similar geometries such as aircraft or

buses. The research will refine the modelling of evacuation drills in practice, which

will then lead to easier evacuation of similar spaces in real life.

Another research that was highly rated

last year was conducted by Jan Pokorný,

a student in the last year of his master's

degree studies in Theoretical Informatics.

The research focused on the design and

analysis of parameterized algorithms for

microaggregation of data. This can be encountered when it is necessary to provide

certain data to a third party, for example

about the users of an application, while

maintaining anonymity.

"The research will contribute to the anonymization of data, for example, social

networks, when it is necessary to publish

datasets with the most relevant information while maintaining the privacy of their

users," adds Jan Pokorný to his research.

The Czech Technical University in Prague is one of the largest and oldest technical universities in Europe. According to

the 2017+ Methodology, it is the best

Czech technical university in the group of

evaluated technical universities. Currently,

CTU has eight faculties (civil, mechanical,

electrical, nuclear and physical engineering, architecture, transport, biomedical

engineering, information technology).