Armando Da Silva Vieira, Lecturer of Applied AI In May 2026, researchers from Oxford, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stanford published a paper (https://arxiv.org/html/2605.10310v1) with an unusually candid premise. AI alignment, they argued, has been dominated almost entirely by preventing harm — safeguards, controllability, compliance. Necessary, but incomplete. Like a psychology that only studies illness […]

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. […]

Protests and conflicts have become influential forces for bringing about change and shaping the political and social landscapes not only on a local demographic level but also on a global scale. In the modern Internet and online social media era, protests have increasingly utilized digital platforms to facilitate discussions, coordinate actions, and spread respective agendas. […]

With the development of Online Social Media (OSM) platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the way individuals connect and exchange information has changed dramatically. These platforms have, however, also led to the problem of misinformation, which can quickly spread on a global scale, and once it has been disseminated, it can be hard to stop. It […]

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 […]

Kea Kohv, Master Student in Data Science An interactive tool developed by Data Science Master’s student Kea Kohv helps find highly rated and popular data science books sold on Amazon. A query for data science books on Amazon returns thousands of results. That is a lot to skim through. In addition, if searching for highly […]

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 […]