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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Together with colleagues from the UK and Sweden, the  UT Institute of Computer Science is organizing the first international workshop on the Testing of Automated Driving Systems (TestADS). The workshop takes place in Toronto, Canada, as part of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST’24). The TestADS workshop aims to […]

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 […]

Data privacy has become trending, and nowadays, people are talking more and more about it. With process mining, privacy becomes more relevant. Because process mining makes it easier to expose the actual business reality. With automatic process discovery, we can reverse engineer the activities that have been performed within the organization and the hand-offs between […]