You can support Pavlina Koutecká's work in a public vote until 20 November here: 2023 | IT SPY. The finalist with the highest number of votes will win the general public award.
The Faculty of Electrical Engineering at CTU will have the chance to extend its unique winning streak in the final of the 14th IT SPY, which has been going on since 2018 - last year, the main prize went to Jiří Ulrich, and in 2021, Jindřiška Deckerová was the first woman ever to win. In the previous two editions, the prestigious title went to Šimon Mandlík and Jan Bayer. All four are graduates of the Open Computer Science programme.
An algorithm to plan the operation theatres
Pavlína Koutecká's work helps to plan the use of operating theatres in hospitals using a branch-and-price algorithm, so that the most important surgical procedures are optimally utilised and prioritised. The algorithm is evaluated in this paper on synthetic instances generated from real hospital settings, and the results show a significant reduction in the number of pricing problems solved (over 40%) and computational time (over 10%) compared to the original method.
Pavlína Koutecká's participation in the finals is also another confirmation of the positive trend, which is the increasing participation of young female computer scientists and their placement at the top of this competition. This year, the competition ambassadors selected the competition entries from almost 1200 projects that were defended in the last academic year at Czech and Slovak universities. This year's competition was dominated by learning algorithms, i.e. the use of artificial intelligence.
About the IT SPY competition
IT SPY is an official competition of Czech and Slovak universities for the best diploma thesis in the field of computer science and information technology. The Czech and Slovak sections of the global professional organisation ACM are the professional guardians of the competition. The aim of the competition is to support students in their studies and to help them apply these efforts and results in practice. Each year, faculties of prestigious Czech and Slovak universities can nominate up to 10% of the total defended works of their students. Their quality is then judged by an academic jury in terms of research, research, evaluation of solutions and implementation. The competition is organised by the Czech and Slovak universities and the Czech and Slovak ACM Chapters (acm.org) and the leading Czech software house Profinit.
