The Edwards Award and the Atlas Copco Services Award recognise the best technical and economic diploma theses from Czech students. The award ceremony took place in Spielberk Business Park on Thursday. The winners received a total of CZK 62,000 in prize money. Photo: The winners of the Edwards Award and the Atlas Copco Services Award. Credit: Official press release.
Brno, Nov 11 (BD) – The overall winner of the fourth annual Edwards Award, which is focused on technical subjects, was Denisa Škrabalová, graduate of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Brno University of Technology. Škrabalová successfully designed, constructed and tested a special holographic module that can be attached to an optical microscope, as she explained: “By combining a holographic module with a standard light microscope, the benefits of holographic microscopy can be transferred to an optical microscope. The module is easily removable, mobile, and cheaper to manufacture than holographic microscopes.” The module has applications in biology, such as in the study of living cells that are otherwise difficult to observe.
The Eye Check mobile app can quickly identify a serious eye disease called leukocoria. With a single facial photo, users of the app can immediately find out whether they suffer from the disease. The application has more than 98% accuracy, and early detection can save a person’s eyesight, according to the author Pavel Hřebíček, who graduated from the Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology and finished in second place among the Edwards Prize winners.
The third place went to another graduate of Brno University of Technology, Viktor Juřička, who wrote a diploma thesis dealing with the development of polymer repair materials using secondary raw materials. Juřička discovered how to use waste materials such as power plant fly ash or glass, which are hard-to-process, as a raw material for the production of refined and durable sanitation materials.
Atlas Copco Services Award, in its second year this year, evaluates theses from economics students and graduates. 40 students from 10 different universities entered their theses for consideration. The expert committee judged the studies according to how new or interesting the ideas were, on clarity, and on thoroughness. The winner of the award was Vojtěch Sadil from the Faculty of Management and Economics at Tomas Bata University in Zlín. The topic of his theses was “The use of chaos theory and Elliott waves in the financial market”. The committee appreciated his determination to prove his argument in practice, not only in theory; he also risked his money to prove his assumptions, increasing his money by 20% in two weeks.
Second place went to Jiří Foltýn, a former student of Masaryk University Faculty of Economics and Administration, who described the attributes and functioning of cryptocurrencies. In third place was Pavla Srbová from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of Brno University of Technology, who attempted to figure out how to predict bankruptcy of construction companies.
Swedish-based Atlas Copco supplies equipment for industry and construction. Edwards is a vacuum engineering company that manufactures and supplies vacuum and abatement equipment used in advanced manufacturing processes. Edwards is a subsidiary of Atlas Copco Group. Both companies have their seats in Brno – Atlas Copco at Spielberk Business Park and Edwards in Slatina.
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