History of the Institute
The Institute of Information Theory and Automation (UTIA) was established on January 1, 1959 by merging two departments of the former Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences - the Laboratory for Automation and Telemechanics and the Information Theory Department of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics.
In the first years after its establishment, the Institute was located in the former Benedictine monastery of Emmaus in Prague Na Slovanech, then in 1973-75 it gradually moved to a new building built on the premises of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague 8 - Ďáblice. This building, which underwent extensive reconstruction in 2008, is still the seat of the Institute today.
In 2007, the Institute was transformed into a public research institution, which brought greater autonomy in deciding research priorities and economic behavior, but also greater responsibility for the financial operations of the Institute.
Jaroslav Kožešník (1959-1984), Stanislav Kubík (1984-1990), Vladimír Kučera (1990-1998), Milan Mareš (1998-2006), Jan Flusser (2007-2017) and Jiřina Vejnarová (since 2017) have successively occupied the director's chair of the Institute.
Since its foundation, the Institute has been engaged in both basic and applied research at the interface of cybernetics, mathematics and robotics. This requires the collaboration of experts from different fields, and the Institute has maintained this interdisciplinary character to this day. Even before 1990, the Institute had already achieved a number of internationally recognized results, e.g., studies on the capacity of information channels with memory (1960s), in algebraic control theory (1970s), in the theory of self-adjusting controllers and in the modeling of large-scale gas distribution networks (1980s).
Today, the main fields include computer science and related parts of mathematics, artificial intelligence, digital signal and image processing, systems theory, control science, and econometrics. Each year, the Institute's staff tackles several dozen projects and publishes hundreds of scientific papers, most of which are presented internationally.
Emmaus Monastery, UTIA headquarters in 1959-72
UTIA building in the Na Slovance area completed in 1972 (state at the turn of the millennium)In addition to its scientific activities, the Institute is heavily involved in teaching students (around 60-semester courses at several universities in the Czech Republic and abroad each year), educating PhD students, and in various popularization activities for the public and high school youth. There is also a long tradition of publishing the international scientific journal Kybernetika, the first issue of which was published in 1965.
Directors of UTIA
Jaroslav Kožešník (1959–1984)
Milan Mareš (1998–2006)
Stanislav Kubík (1984–1990)
Jan Flusser (2007-2017)
Vladimír Kučera (1990– 1998)