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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

To explain the importance of recognising and mitigating the impact of phishing attacks, our institute organised a CyberPhish seminar on 13 October, which was attended by more than 35 participants, including educators and students, stakeholders of private and public sectors, and representatives from businesses, police and government. The aim of the CyberPhish “Safeguarding against Phishing […]

More than 2000 participants were involved in cyber defence exercise Locked Shields 2022 that took place from April 19 to 22. This year, one of the venues of the event was the Delta Centre in Tartu. Employees of the HPC Center of the University of Tartu and the Institute of Computer Science participated in the […]

Ilmar Uduste studies Data Science at the Institute of Computer Science. This specialisation makes IT solutions smart and creates value in every field. To take up studies in Data Science, you need to have a bachelor’s degree and completed at least 60 ECTS of courses of IT, mathematics or statistics.  I did my bachelor’s in […]

When I was asked whether I would be willing to write a story about why somebody like me should decide to come to study at the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science, I immediately agreed. In fact, I was almost about to suggest sharing my positive experience with “Conversion Master in IT” myself, but […]

Researchers from the University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science are taking part in the EU Horizon project SPATIAL (Security and Privacy Accountable Technology Innovations, Algorithms and Machine Learning), which aims to develop resilient accountable metrics, privacy-preserving methods, verification tools and system solutions that will serve as critical building blocks for trustworthy AI in ICT […]