On 25 January, Mahir Gulzar defended his doctoral thesis „Addressing Real-world Scenarios via Motion Prediction in Autonomous Driving“. To mark the occasion, Professor Jaak Vilo, Head of the Institute of Computer Science, interviewed Mahir about how his journey in the world of research has unfolded. If you had to describe your PhD in one sentence […]

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 […]

You can find out more about Kristiina Rahkema’s PhD thesis in English here.  Nutitelefonidest on saanud meie elu lahutamatu osa. Iga asja jaoks on olemas äpp: sõnumite saatmiseks, internetipanga külastuseks, auto lukust avamiseks. Kahjuks on paljud neist rakendustest ebaturvalised. Turvavigu on avastatud sellistes rakendustes nagu Facebook, TikTok ja WhatsApp. Nende turvavigade raskusaste võib ulatuda andmelekkest […]

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 […]

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 […]

Digital games producer Edvin Aedma tells us how one presentation from Keith Devlin inspired him to take up teaching game development and how it affected UniTartuCS. Sometimes before 2012, Keith Devlin visited Institute of Computer Science at University of Tartu and gave a rather fascinating lecture about the synergy between teaching mathematics and videogames. I […]

  Institute of Computer Science organizes public seminars on various topics related to data science. In March 15, the seminar topic was autonomous vehicles. We had several intriguing guest speakers, including Andrej Karpathy, the Director of AI at Tesla, who told us about the technology behind Tesla’s self-driving cars. While Andrej’s (and Starship’s Lindsey Roberts’) […]