Šimon Mandlík awarded for his thesis about internet mapping

Šimon Mandlík, the fresh graduate of the Open Informatics master's program, won the prestigious  IT Spy competition which awards the best diploma thesis from the field of computer science. He placed first out of 1 400 students registered in the competition. Congratulations Šimon! And what does the thesis supervised by Tomáš Pevný actually deal with?

The topic of Šimon's thesis is Mapping the Internet: Modelling Entity Interactions in Complex Heterogeneous Networks. The jury was impressed by Šimon's computer program that allows better processing of large amounts of problematic, so-called dirty data. This software has the potential to dramatically improve the efficiency of artificial intelligence in some industries. It was already tested using data generated in Avast and Cisco (our industry partners) and proved to be very effective. In the future, Šimon's work could contribute to improving and accelerating security software updates leading to better protection of users from new threats.

Accurate suggestions for security program updates

Šimon focused specifically on the cybersecurity area in which the evaluation was user data demanding due to a number of specific data formats and their volume and where very often the selection is selective and automatic processing is very limited. His motivation was clear.

"Large companies today own huge volumes of data, which are often among the most valuable in their possession. The fact that the processing of some data sources is very difficult, and so it does not occur at all, is a huge missed opportunity, which I wanted to change with this program, which is unique in its functionality. The moment new malware appears, all you have to do is run a script that goes through the available data and trains a new detection model, which will allow more accurate suggestions for security program updates,” explains Šimon. We cannot wait to see the impact of student work on our society!