Krzysztof Wołkonowski, a master's student in the field of Algorithmic Computer Science, won distinctions in two national competitions with his engineering thesis and first place in the competition for the best paper at the ELEMENTS conference. Congratulations!

Krzysztof Wołkonowski, a graduate from Algorithmic Computer Science at our Faculty, was recognised for his bachelor's thesis titled „Anomaly detection algorithms for large data sets". He received two distinctions: in the 4th Competition of the Polish Information Processing Society for the best bachelor's theses and projects in the field of IT and in the 16th Inter-University Young Masters Competition organised as part of the 30th ICT Forum.

– It is worth noting that our student's thesis was the only one among those distinguished and awarded in the 4th Competition of the Polish Information Processing Society that was prepared independently (the others are team projects) – says proudly Dr. Karol Gotfryd from the Department of Fundamentals of Computer Science, the supervisor of the talented engineer.

But that is not yet all. Krzysztof Wołkonowski also took first place in the competition for the best paper during the 3rd Student Scientific Conference ELEMENTS, which took place in October at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. The event, which brought together representatives of science and businesses, was devoted to data analysis methods. They were considered from the perspective of mathematics, applied mathematics, data analysis and computer science.

– My work is about algorithms for detecting data anomalies, i.e. for detecting deviations, irregularities and observations which occur much less frequently than most observed records – explains Krzysztof Wołkonowski. The author of the awarded thesis explains what kind of anomalies he means: – In the case of network traffic analysis, we are talking about network attacks, and in the case of medical data, we can talk about diseases". Most of the data I analysed was related to medicine, and more specifically – to mammography, arrhythmia, diabetes, and hypothyroidism.

Our student also looked at data sets related to astronomical measurements and spacecraft failures. Another area for the application of the data analysis method, which was investigated by the student of Algorithmic Computer Science, is detecting suspicious traffic related to banking transactions and the financial sector or computer security.  

– We put particular emphasis on streaming algorithms, i.e. those that can be used in real-time systems, which means that instead of analysing the entire set at once, we have to process the data that comes in continuously and immediately decide whether they are anomalies or not – says Krzysztof Wołkonowski, who plans to continue his research as part of his master's thesis, also prepared under the supervision of Dr. Karol Gotfryd.  

– We want to continue the topic of algorithms for detecting anomalies, especially in streaming data. There was also an idea to analyse methods that use histograms – says the scientist. – Histograms are a way of representing the distribution of data, so we are able to construct such histograms for both static and dynamic sets. And this is where there are still many topics to investigate, regarding how to efficiently construct these histograms in the case of dynamic data. How to do it as effectively as possible, so as not to significantly increase the time complexity of the algorithms, and on the other hand, to obtain structures that allow the most precise answers to the question of what is an anomaly and what is not.

As you can see, Krzysztof Wołkonowski's master's thesis promises to be interesting.

Let us add that during the 16th National, Inter-University Young Masters Competition organised as part of the 30th ICT Forum, the distinctions were also awarded to other students from our Faculty:

• Mateusz Chęciński, Witold Karaś, Adam Niezgoda for the paper titled „Implementation of hierarchical ring signatures in a blockchain system with anamorphic functionality”
• Michał Jóźków for the paper „Security analysis of a typical terminal station on the Internet”
• Paweł Dzikiewicz, Adam Pawłowski, Jakub Nera and Tomasz Koralewski for the project „BoreNoMore”
• Magdalena Gołębiowska for the paper "Gameplay Personalization based on Emotion Recognition". 

Congratulations to all distinguished students from our Faculty!