Lecturer of Applied AI Armando Vieira shares his thoughts on Medium, an online publishing platform. The dominant discourse on AI alignment rests on a quiet but catastrophic assumption: that morality can be imposed on systems that do not experience anything. The debate unfolds as if values were transferable objects — encoded, optimized, constrained — rather than lived […]

The dominant paradigm in modern AI rests on a deceptively simple premise: intelligence emerges from minimizing prediction error across vast datasets. We train neural networks to be accurate, to match patterns, to reduce loss functions. Yet this approach, for all its empirical success, may be fundamentally misaligned with the nature of intelligence itself. Here is […]

Kaur Alasoo, Associate Professor of Bioinformatics at the Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, has combined computer science and molecular biology in his research to find new ways of predicting the effects of genetic variants and to better understand rare diseases. He was interviewed by Professor Jaak Vilo, Head of the Chair of Data […]

Djeane Debora Onthoni has joined the Health Data and AI research group at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science, bringing international expertise in applying AI to health data analysis and precision medicine. He was interviewed by professor Jaak Vilo, Head of the Chair of Data Science. You recently came to Estonia to the […]

Imagine a room with millions of mysterious switches and hundreds of ceiling lamps. You don’t know which switch does what, but you’re curious. As you experiment with different combinations, the lamps’ brightness varies. This scene is a simple metaphor for the complex challenge of genomics research – understanding how different genetic ‘switches’ affect our health. […]

The article was initially published in Ekspress by Greete Lehepuu. The app works like Google Maps: given genetic coordinates associated with a disease it finds which gene is likely to cause the disease and in which tissue. Imagine that the only way to find your way in an unknown city is to buy the map […]

By Dmytro Fishman, Junior Lecturer of Data Science The human organism is a profoundly complex mechanism, consisting of trillions of cells, each powered by about 42 million protein molecules that interact with one another in a gazillion of ways. Recently, scientists developed technologies (i.e. high-throughput screening) that enable us to listen and record data from […]

On June 28, Dmytro Fishman defended his PhD thesis on “Developing a data analysis pipeline for automated protein profiling in immunology”. In this work, Dmytro and his collaborators explored the dynamics of autoimmune diseases as well as developed a software tool that simplifies similar research in the future. Proteins are essential elements of all living […]

On June 21, Liis Kolberg defended her PhD thesis on “Developing and applying bioinformatics tools for gene expression data interpretation” which provides convenient tools that simplify the work of biologists and saves their time.  Modern technologies enable researchers to simultaneously measure the expression levels of all genes under different conditions and in different groups of […]

While human average life expectancy has surged in the past century, a growing concern is a rising disease burden in the later stages of life. It is well known that lifestyle choices can help to prevent or delay disease onset, but once the disease has manifested, medical treatment (such as in the form of drugs) […]

We are glad to announce that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has recognized Prof. Jaak Vilo as their Senior Member being the first researcher from Estonia who has received this prestigious title. ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, which every year awards its members, who for years have demonstrated performance […]

On December 21, Madis Vasser defended his PhD thesis „Testing a Computational Theory of Brain Functioning with Virtual Reality“. In his thesis, he investigated the concept of active inference (AI) using virtual reality (VR) devices. During the work they developed VR software, conducted experiments on human study participants and compiled a set of guidelines for […]