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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).
www.technikaatrh.cz
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