Death announcement about prof.Karel Pala

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Karel Pala, professor emeritus of our faculty. He passed away on Wednesday morning, February 15, 2023, at the age of 84. He worked at FI from its beginning in 1994 until last year, when his health no longer allowed him to work actively. In 1997, Karel Pala founded the Natural Language Processing Laboratory and the related study program, which has been attended by hundreds of students. During his almost thirty-year tenure, nineteen PhD students have graduated from the laboratory, and together with him they have participated in the implementation of many large and small national and international research projects. He was at the origin of many successful and useful tools for automatic processing of Czech (especially morphological and syntactic analyzers) and databases (semantic networks, valency lexicons, thesauri). In 2009, Karel Pala was awarded the medal of the Minister of Education for the Internet Language Reference Book project. In 2014, he was awarded by the Minister of the Interior for security research in the field of anonymous text authorship attribution.

Above all, Karel Pala has won many of us over with his friendly approach to his field, which foreshadowed our future careers. This will always be greatly appreciated.

Pavel Rychlý, on behalf of the Natural Language Processing Centre team