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A total of 7,800 historical maps, parish registers, chronicles, and official books document coexistence between Czechs and Germans on the Porta fontium portal. The automated conversion of these materials into digital form and their release to the public was made possible in part thanks to the work of Pavel Král from the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. Using machine learning, the newly appointed professor of computer science has also made old maps of the Stable Cadastre accessible. “What I value most is that the results were used in practice – both within the Porta fontium archival portal and by the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre, where the maps are now being processed for presentation to the general public,” Pavel Král said.

In cooperation with the company icz a.s., he also developed a system that saves doctors time. “Put simply, the machine reads the text of a doctor’s report on its own and produces a list of diseases the patient has suffered from. It significantly reduces the administrative burden on hospitals,” Král added. The so-called reporting assistant AV(D) is currently used by healthcare professionals at Brno University Hospital for diagnostic coding. It will soon be deployed at Motol University Hospital in Prague, as well as in Liberec and Jičín, with other hospitals also expressing interest.

What Pavel Král enjoys most about working in computer science are moments when, despite initial research uncertainty, he ultimately succeeds in designing a working method. After completing his master’s degree, he had not planned to remain in academia. “I was drawn to practical work, where I also spent several years. Over time, however, I found that the same types of tasks kept repeating, which bored me. That’s why I decided to return to the university and begin doctoral studies under dual supervision – at the University of West Bohemia and at France’s Henri Poincaré University,” he explained.

According to the new professor, the challenge in the field of information technology is not only the rapid development of technology itself, but also how people can use it meaningfully. According to Král, the development of machine learning and generative AI opens up not only new possibilities, but also questions: how reliable are their outputs, how to read them correctly, and how to integrate them so that they really save people time. Another problem is the amount of data generated across disciplines. Scientists will therefore have to continue to develop methods for quickly navigating data and making sense of it so that it is not just stored but actually serves doctors or archivists, for example.

In his work at the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the UWB, Pavel Král also values collaboration with students. “Their questions or a different perspective can move a solution forward, sometimes in a completely new direction. I’m often surprised by how quickly some of them can get oriented in a new problem and then solve it successfully,” he concluded. In recent years, he says, interest in computer science among students has been strong – not only in programming, but especially in machine learning methods and artificial intelligence, which are currently in high demand in practice.