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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Another round of digital product management industry projects is successfully completed in the Sandbox! This semester we had four industry partners, and our student teams did excellent work in addressing the challenges and prototyping proposed solutions. SEB PankThe challenge: find a way how to help its clients on the journey towards a green home. During […]

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 […]

Dietmar Pfahl, Professor of Software Engineering, co-authored the article “Synergies between Education, Training, and Research: How the Institute of Computer Science does Industry-Relevant Research in Software Engineering”. Doing industry-relevant research is the mission of the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Tartu. This new publication in one of the top-notch software engineering journals […]

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 […]