17. 9. 2024

"We've been carrying chip debt since the 1970s, Europe was happy to get rid of chip production because it's water and electricity-intensive. And now we're slowly and painfully catching up. At the same time, we will need more and more chips, and even more sophisticated ones than today," says Tomáš Pitner, professor at the Faculty of Informatics of Masaryk University and head of the research centre, about the situation in which the Czech Republic and Europe find themselves. But in exactly which way?

31. 7. 2024

The number of cyberattacks will not decrease. Let's face it and defend ourselves. This is how one could sum up the words of Paula Januszkiewicz, a Polish cybersecurity expert who spoke this spring at Security 2024, Aricoma's annual conference about IT security trends. Januszkiewicz, whose company CQURE has four offices around the world, spoke about why companies and institutions can't resist attacks, how to get more experts, and where the industry is headed.

17. 6. 2024

I can think of three major technological innovations I've seen in my career: the internet (connecting everything), mobile (connecting all the time), and big language models (LLM, generative AI). The penetration of the first two has been relatively slow (within years). AI, on the other hand, has swept in like a hurricane.

11. 6. 2024

65,000 kilometres, 22 countries and 606 days. In 2016, motorcyclist and traveller Vojta Lavický set off with his then-girlfriend on the trip of a lifetime around the world. Thanks to this, he saw with his own eyes the remote villages of Peru and Huascarán National Park, the yurt pastures and wild horses of Kyrgyzstan or the Mongolian lunar-like landscape. The trip showed him many times that even bad things are good for something in the end and that the most important thing about travelling is to have the courage to actually go.

13. 12. 2023

New technology has arrived and with it a lot of new questions. How many times have you experienced this? Lawyer Petra Dolejšová has done it many times, and right now she is dealing with almost nothing but the legal aspects of using artificial intelligence. "We revolve around questions of who owns the output from AI, whether it is possible to generate images of specific people and whether you can use styles such as of the painter Mucha or heroes from Marvel movies. All of this is legally quite clear, but it turns out that people are still grasping the essence of copyright law," muses the expert, who believes we have much bigger thinking to do - who do we "pin" responsibility to for any potential transgressions of technology.

3. 10. 2023

Careful, this is a very painful topic. That’s because we’ll be talking about burns with Jitka Schořová and Miroslav "Miki" Volk. Specifically, how data, annotation, artificial intelligence, mobile apps and advanced image recognition methods can play a part in burn diagnosis. This is exactly the task that the SYSCOM Software development team was assigned by the largest burn centre in the Czech Republic (and one of the biggest in Europe), the University Hospital Královské Vinohrady. And it is already - since the beginning of this summer, to be precise - part of Aricoma, the Czech Republic’s largest IT group.

3. 10. 2023

Anything can now be done electronically. You can order lunch and groceries to take home, make a doctor's appointment, or enrol on a course at college. Meanwhile, what is still the music of the future is documentation. But that future is around the corner. A consortium of entities has been set up at the European Commission to deliver, within two years, a prototype European digital identity, which serves as the basis for electronic documents, internationally valid prescriptions for medicines or a driving licence that will be valid everywhere in the Union. Experts from Aricoma, who specialise in identity verification and authentication, also have a role to play in this long-awaited step forward.

12. 7. 2023

Philosophy and mathematics may be far more closely linked than they might first seem. And an open chat with Hynek Cihlář, who works in the VPT4 team, only confirms this. In addition to advanced statistics and neural networks, we also touched on the topic of human values and the difference between artificial and human intelligence. "It is only humans who will decide whether the positive or negative qualities of artificial intelligence will prevail in the future. It is our duty to work continuously to develop it in the desired direction and to enable us to identify and monitor the inherent risks early on. In any case - it will be a major task," says the solution architect, who started his twenty-first season in the Autocont jersey, now Aricoma, at the beginning of the year.

17. 8. 2023

Older generations will remember this. Long queues at the border, occasional butterflies in your stomach when the officer spends too long checking your documents. With the Czech Republic's accession to the European Union, checks at the borders of the member states have been abolished. This does not mean that borders are not protected. On the contrary. The Schengen Information System (SIS), for example, has been in operation for years, and in the last few weeks a new generation of SIS has been in place, forming one of the virtual shields of the Union's external and internal borders. Their defences are becoming more sophisticated, running continuously in the background, and there are already plans to improve them further. Specialists from Aricoma are involved in all this.

26. 7. 2023

When a company implements an information or production system, it knows the expected return and all the future benefits. The finance manager gets better reports, the warehouse manager gets an immediate overview of available items, the accountant gets clearer invoicing documents. It can thus simply calculate the investment. The situation is far more complex as far as cybersecurity and data protection are concerned. Because you're basically "just" paying for everything to work and you don't know much about the background as a whole. That's why many companies say: "it doesn't concern us", "nobody's interested in our data" or "we have something in place, and that's probably enough". And potential gains sell to everyone significantly better than potential losses.

29. 6. 2023

It was already planned five years ago, when the Aricoma brand first appeared on the Czech market: although the individual parts of the largest Czech IT holding operated under their own names, it was clear that they would become even more connected up over time. And that time is now. Instead of Autocont, AEC, Komix, CES EA and other such brands, customers will now only be seeing Aricoma. "Rebranding is the outcome of a process to enable us to really act as one company. We want the market to see us as a single strong brand," says Milan Sameš, CEO of Aricoma.

21. 6. 2023

When experts from Aricoma, a leading Czech cybersecurity firm among others, issued their industry outlook for this year, the message was clear: the number of hacktivist and politically-oriented cyberattacks will continue to rise. Why is this happening? Who are the people behind the attacks? And most importantly, how to resist their efforts? Maroš Barabas (MB) and Filip Zvařič (FZ) answer all this in our interview. And they point out that we often misunderstand what motivates attackers