The 25th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES) took place in Tartu from December 2–4, 2024. The conference brought more than 50 internationally renowned researchers and industry practitioners to Tartu, for interesting talks and discussions. Most participants came from Europe, mainly from Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, but there were also participants from […]

Introduction: Privacy-preserving computation is a crucial discipline that protects the privacy of confidential data while facilitating secure analysis. In graph problems, secure multiparty computation (SMC) presents a promising approach to performing these functionalities. This article delves into the notable advancements in privacy-preserving parallel algorithms recently introduced in a Ph.D. thesis. By integrating graph algorithms with […]

Data privacy has become trending, and nowadays, people are talking more and more about it. With process mining, privacy becomes more relevant. Because process mining makes it easier to expose the actual business reality. With automatic process discovery, we can reverse engineer the activities that have been performed within the organization and the hand-offs between […]

The cornerstone of democracy is the right for voters to participate in free and fair elections. However, securing elections is a non-trivial task due to the conflicting security requirements.  On the one hand, to provide the freedom to vote, it should not be possible to coerce voters into voting for a specific candidate. Therefore, the […]

Nowadays, a vast majority of business processes involve many tedious and repetitive tasks, for example transferring data across multiple systems or transforming data from one format to another. These tasks are time-consuming, error-prone, and by themselves do not bring much value to the underlying processes. Their automation can bring many benefits such as error-rate reduction, […]

Modern organizations must constantly adjust their business processes in order to adapt to internal and external changes, such as new competitors, new regulations, customer expectations, or strategic objectives. For example, due to a pandemic, a retailer might experience a 50% increase in their number of online orders; however, during the same time, their volume of […]

The original article (in Estonian) by Airika Harrik was published in Novaator. Estonia has used the ID card system as a means to identify its citizens for almost 20 years. During those years, several security issues have emerged. A new PhD dissertation from the University of Tartu has shed light on those issues and pointed […]

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 […]

We are happy to share the great news that the paper “Designing Corporate Hackathons With a Purpose: The Future of Software Development” co-authored by our Associate Professor Alexander Nolte with colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University, Github and Microsoft was named as the Runner-up for the 2019 Best Paper Award from IEEE Software by the IEEE […]

On September 25, Orlenys López Pintado defended his PhD thesis „Collaborative Business Process Execution on the Blockchain: The Caterpillar System“. In his thesis, Orlenys addressed the problem of automating the execution of collaborative business processes on top of blockchain technology in a way that takes advantage of the trust-enhancing capabilities of this technology while offering […]

On Friday, August 28 Janno Siim defended his PhD thesis „Non-Interactive Shuffle Arguments„ A fundamental requirement for all democratic governments is a secure voting system. In recent years some countries, like Estonia and Switzerland, have adopted internet voting (i-voting), and many more have experimented (e.g., Norway and Australia) or have plans to adopt it in […]

On the 13th of August Karim Baghery defended his PhD thesis „Reducing trust and improving security in zk-SNARKs and commitments„ in which he studied the zk-SNARKs from two different perspectives, namely reducing trust in their setup phase and improving their security in different applications. On the need for proof systems People frequently are asked to […]