Intro / Mysteries / Scribblings / Preachings / Boring / Other / Contact

---

Dr. Vít Nováček (he/him) holds a PhD from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway (now transformed into DSI, University of Galway). Apart from that, Vít has BSc and MSc degrees in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence (AI), and also BA degrees in political science and media studies, all from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Vít is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Informatics of Masaryk University. He also does quite a bit of consulting in the biomedical AI space (e.g., for Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute or BioXcel Therapeutics, Inc.). In the past, Vít was a Research Fellow at the University of Galway, leading the Biomedical Discovery Informatics Unit at the Data Science Institute there. For quite a few years, he was also a research affiliate at the Information Sciences Institute at University of Southern California.

Vít’s personal research interests revolve around developing machine-aided discovery solutions by means of machine / representation / relational learning, explainable AI and text mining, with a strong focus on biomedical use cases (e.g. prediction of adverse drug effects, protein drug targets or signalling reactions, and also more clinically oriented cancer relapse prediction and oncological patient empowerment). Vít has a strong track record in applying his research to industrial use cases (primarily within a six year, multi-million euro collaboration with Fujitsu Laboratories Limited). He also coordinated the ICT branch of the ISCA-Japan SFI project at NUI Galway.

Vít has been the primary, sole or senior author of over 40 peer-reviewed international publications, and a designated inventor on 7 patents (4 of which have been granted in the US, EU, ES and JP jurisdictions as of 2023). He was a plenary speaker at a premier national AI conference, invited panelist at IEEE’s CBMS (one of the top international conferences in medical informatics), and served on dozens of program or organisation committees of international conferences and workshops (including top venues like CIKM or AAAI). In 2009, Vít led a team that won the 2nd prize in the Elsevier Grand Challenge competition which was aimed at knowledge enhancement in life sciences. His team beat groups from Stanford, CMU and 70 other high profile institutions from all over the world in the process, and brought home $15,000 prize money. Speaking of money, Vít has been instrumental in securing over 8 million euros worth of funding to date, with over 1.5 million euros from that funding allocated directly to Vít’s research groups.