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 […]

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 […]

Jaak Vilo, Kallol Roy Algorithmics (MTAT.03.238) is an obligatory course in the Computer Science MSc curriculum. As such it is intended to remind everyone of the foundations of algorithms and data structures but also to go beyond and teach some more advanced concepts (like succinct data structures, for example).  The course aims at linking different […]

On the 13th of December Lidia Feklistova defended her PhD thesis on „Learners of an introductory programming MOOC: background variables, engagement patterns and performance” We constantly improve our knowledge and skills to be successful. Participation in massive open online courses (MOOCs) supports ongoing professional development and lifelong learning. Keeping in mind the huge number of participants in […]

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 […]

Estonia does not have many natural minerals or a significant population like many wealthy countries, but it has the most unicorns per capita globally. As most unicorns use technology to offer solutions for solving problems, we need more IT practitioners who can use computation power to solve various algorithmic issues.  “Thinking computationally is not anymore […]

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 […]