This paper presents teaching materials, particularly assignments and ideas for classroom activities, from a new course on large language models (LLMs) taught at Charles University. The assignments include experiments with LLM inference for weather report generation and machine translation. The classroom activities include class quizzes, focused research on downstream tasks and datasets, and an interactive "best paper" session aimed at reading and comprehension of research papers.

Labeling speech down to the identity and time boundaries of phones is a labor-intensive part of phonetic research. To simplify this work, we created a free open-source tool generating phone sequences from Czech text and time-aligning them with audio. Low architecture complexity makes the design approachable for students of phonetics. Acoustic model ReLU NN with 56k weights was trained using PyTorch on small CommonVoice data. Alignment and variant selection decoder is implemented in Python with matrix library. A Czech pronunciation generator is composed of simple rule-based blocks capturing the logic of the language where possible, allowing modification of transcription approach details. Compared to tools used until now, data preparation efficiency improved, the tool is usable on Mac, Linux and Windows in Praat GUI or command line, achieves mostly correct pronunciation variant choice including glottal stop detection, algorithmically captures most of Czech assimilation logic and is both didactic and practical.

The Thirty-Third International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-34) was to be held May 17-19, 2021, at the Double Tree Ocean Point Resort and Spa in North Miami Beach, Florida, USA. Due to COVID-19 pandemic and travel restriction, the conference held both virtual and in-person. The planned conference events included tutorials, invited speakers, special tracks, and presentations of papers, posters, and awards. The conference chair was Keith Brawner from the Army Research Laboratory. The program co-chairs were Roman Barták from Charles University, Prague, and Eric Bell, USA.

PRAGUE - Vlastimil Gular's life took an unwelcome turn a year ago: minor surgery on his vocal cords revealed throat cancer, which led to the loss of his larynx -- and with it, his voice. But the 51-year-old father of four is still chatting away using his own voice rather than the tinny timbre of a robot, thanks to an innovative app developed by two Czech universities. "I find this very useful," Gular said, using the app to type in what he wanted to say, in his own voice, via a mobile phone. "I'm not very good at using the voice prosthesis," he added, pointing at the hole the size of a large coin in his throat. A small silicon device implanted in the throat allows people to speak by pressing the hole with their fingers, to regulate airflow through the prosthesis, and so create sound.

The Thirty-First International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-31) was held May 21-23, 2018, at the Crowne Plaza Oceanfront in Melbourne, Florida, USA. The conference events included invited speakers, special tracks, and presentations of papers, posters, and awards. The conference chair was Zdravko Markov from Central Connecticut State University. The program co-chairs were Vasile Rus from the University of Memphis and Keith Brawner from the Army Research Laboratory. The special tracks were coordinated by Roman Barták from Charles University in Prague.

Solving challenging computational problems involving time has been a critical component in the development of artificial intelligence systems almost since the inception of the field. This book provides a concise introduction to the core computational elements of temporal reasoning for use in AI systems for planning and scheduling, as well as systems that extract temporal information from data. It presents a survey of temporal frameworks based on constraints, both qualitative and quantitative, as well as of major temporal consistency techniques. The book also introduces the reader to more recent extensions to the core model that allow AI systems to explicitly represent temporal preferences and temporal uncertainty. This book is intended for students and researchers interested in constraint-based temporal reasoning.

Planning problems deal with finding a sequence of actions that transfer the initial state of the world into a desired state. Frequently such problems are solved by dedicated algorithms but there exist planners based on translating the planning problem into a different formalism such as constraint satisfaction or Boolean satisfiability and using a general solver for this formalism. The paper describes how to enhance existing constraint models of planning problems by using techniques such as symmetry breaking (dominance rules), singleton consistency, and lifting.