Dr. Jan Kocoń and Dr. Tomasz Szandała from WIT were among the next 24 people who joined Academia Iuvenum at Wrocław University of Science and Technology for the 2025-2027 term. The new members will replace their colleagues who have been members of the committee since 2023. The ceremonial awarding of nominations is scheduled for 8 July. That is also when the entire third-term committee of the Academia will receive official letters of acknowledgement and gratitude.

Academia Iuvenum (AIm) consists of successful researchers from Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (at least one year after obtaining Ph.D. title). Its task is to undertake various initiatives for the University, create a platform for the exchange of scientific ideas, and enable young scientists to express opinions inside and outside the University.

The body consists of 48 people. Every year, new 24 people are appointed for a two-year term of office by the Rector, upon the recommendation of the Rector's Committee for Scientific Awards. Among the recently appointed members of the Academy are scientists from our Faculty – Dr. Jan Kocoń and Dr. Tomasz Szandała.

Dr. Jan Kocoń | Information and Communication Technology | Department of Artificial Intelligence

He works with artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Since 2011, he has been working on projects related to large language models and personalised machine learning.

According to Dr. Kocoń, his most notable work is a series of publications titled "Personalisation of Artificial Intelligence Methods for Subjective Tasks in Natural Language Processing", which comprises sixteen works, including five publications in scientific journals and eleven in peer-reviewed conference materials.

He is the scientific director of the PLLuM project and the coordinator of language model training in the HIVE project, as well as the development coordinator of a contextual and personalised language data processing laboratory as part of the CLARIN-PL project.

During his term of office in AIm, the scientist from W4 plans to focus on the personalisation of large language models, new architectures for language models, and enhanced reasoning, as well as the analysis of cultural differences in language models and the development of large language models for the Polish language, along with processing texts into knowledge graphs.

He also intends to organise a series of training sessions dedicated to the practical application of AI tools in education and academic work.

Dr. Tomasz Szandała | Information and Communication Technology | Department of Computer Science in Engineering

His greatest achievement is the development of the Principal Image Sections Mapping (PRISM) method, which represents a groundbreaking step in the field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). He focused on the issue of imprecise and blurry heat maps generated by popular methods such as GradCAM or occlusion techniques.

His method uses principal component analysis (PCA) to identify and visualise the key sections of the image that influence the model's decisions. Instead of generating blurred, hard-to-interpret heat maps, PRISM creates colourful image masks in the RGB space, which clearly indicate the key elements recognised by the neural network. He described his method in detail in the prestigious journal "Information Sciences".

His work in the field of neural networks is frequently cited, and the Swiss Scholarship Commission awarded him the prestigious annual ESKAS scholarship for his research project.

In the coming years, he plans to focus on the issue of detecting deepfake images using deep neural networks.

The other researchers who have been appointed for the 2025-2027 term include:

• Dr. Anna Kubicka-Sowińska | Architecture and Urban Planning | Faculty of Architecture |
Department of History of Architecture, Art and Technology
• Dr. Agnieszka Krakos | Automation, Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Space Technologies |
Faculty of Electronics, Photonics and Microsystems | Department of Microsystems
• Dr. Agnieszka Mirkowska | Automation, Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Space Technologies |
Faculty of Electrical Engineering | Department of Electrical Engineering Fundamentals
• Dr. Dominik Drabik | Biomedical Engineering | Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technology |
Department of Biomedical Engineering
• Dr. Marta Fiedot | Chemical Engineering | Faculty of Chemistry | Department of Polymer Engineering and Technology
• Dr. Maciej Kaniewski | Chemical Engineering | Faculty of Chemistry
| Department of Chemical Process Engineering and Technology
• Dr. Adrian Chajec | Civil Engineering, Geodesy and Transport | Faculty of Civil Engineering | Department of Materials Engineering and Construction Processes
• Dr. Paweł Niewiadomski | Civil Engineering, Geodesy and Transport | Faculty of Civil Engineering | Department of Materials Engineering and Construction Processes
• Dr. Patryk Obstarczyk | Materials Engineering | Faculty of Chemistry | Institute of Advanced Materials
• Dr. Anna Dmitruk | Mechanical Engineering| Faculty of Mechanical Engineering | Department of Lightweight Elements Engineering, Foundry and Automation
• Dr. Piotr Gruber | Mechanical Engineering | Faculty of Mechanical Engineering | Department of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies
• Dr. Andrzej Pawlak | Mechanical Engineering | Faculty of Mechanical Engineering | Department of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies
• Dr. Paweł Stabla | Mechanical Engineering | Faculty of Mechanical Engineering | Department of Mechanics, Materials and Biomedical Engineering
• Dr. Jakub Mularski | Environmental Engineering, Mining and Energy | Faculty of Mechanical and Power Engineering | Department of Energy Conversion Engineering
• Dr. Marcin Wdowikowski | Environmental Engineering, Mining and Energy | Faculty of Environmental Engineering | Department of Water and Wastewater Management and Waste Technology
• Dr. Paweł Plewa | Mathematics | Faculty of Mathematics | Department of Analysis and Stochastic Processes
• Dr. Marta Dudek | Chemical Sciences | Faculty of Chemistry | Institute of Advanced Materials
• Dr. Dominik Terefinko | Chemical Sciences | Faculty of Chemistry | Department of Analytical Chemistry and Chemical Metallurgy
• Dr. Andrzej Nowok | Physical Sciences | Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technology | Department of Experimental Physics
• Dr. Kinga Żołnacz | Physical Sciences | Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technnology | Department of Optics and Photonics
• Dr. Pratik Mullick | Management and Quality Sciences | Faculty of Management | Department of Operations Research and Business Intelligence

Who can join AIm?

Academia Iuvenum is open to scientists who obtained a doctoral degree no sooner than one year and no later than seven years before the commencement of the term of office (in the case of employees taking full-time maternity or parental leave, this period is extended by one year for each born or adopted child), who do not have a habilitation degree and who have significant achievements in the scientific discipline they represent.

AIm members can count on a number of benefits that are intended to help them focus on their scientific work, including an additional 50 percent pay rise to their assistant professor salary or reducing the teaching load to 120 hours.

They can also benefit from a program of specialized training and workshops on various issues – incl. effectively obtaining grants, project management, public speaking, contacts with the media or the art of argumentation.