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 […]

On 13 January, Viacheslav Komisarenko defended his doctoral thesis “Aligning Training Loss to Evaluation Metrics in Deep Learning”. To mark the occasion, Professor Jaak Vilo, Head of the Institute of Computer Science, interviewed Viacheslav about how his journey in the world of research has unfolded. What did you enjoy about working with formal models, proofs […]

Radwa El Shawi shares her journey and research at the University of Tartu, at the Chair of Data Science, where she focuses on democratizing machine learning to make AI more accessible, explainable, and human-centered. She was interviewed by Professor Jaak Vilo, Head of the Institute of Computer Science. How did you start doing science and […]

On 15 January 2026, Marharyta Dominich defended her doctoral dissertation titled “Advancing human-centric counterfactual explanations in explainable AI” (supervised by Raul Vicente and Eduard Barbu). On this occasion, Professor Jaak Vilo, Head of the Institute of Computer Science, spoke with Marharyta about her journey into research so far and the possible next steps in her […]

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 […]

With a passion for artificial intelligence and a journey spanning academia and industry across Europe, Asad Munir brings a global perspective to the University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science. He was interviewed by professor Jaak Vilo, Head of the Chair of Data Science. You came lately to Estonia to the Institute of Computer Science […]

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 […]

Abbas Cheddad is an Associate Professor of Applied Data Science at the Institute of Computer Science. His research focuses on computer vision, applied machine learning, and image processing and analysis. He was interviewed by professor Jaak Vilo, Head of the Chair of Data Science. You came lately to Estonia to the Institute of Computer Science […]

You can find out more about Pavlo Tertychnyi’s PhD thesis here.  Money laundering represents a substantial risk to global financial systems, allowing criminals to conceal the illegitimate origins of funds and integrate them into the lawful economy. Its repercussions extend beyond financial ramifications, encompassing the destabilization of financial systems, threats to national security, and the erosion […]

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. […]