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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

On the 9th of December Jakob Mass defended his PhD thesis on „Process management for Internet of mobile things“. The Internet of Things (IoT) promotes solutions such as a smart city, where everyday objects connect with info systems and each other. One example is a road condition monitoring system, where connected vehicles, such as buses, […]

On the 30th of September, Mubashar Iqbal defended his PhD. thesis on “Reference Framework for Managing Security Risks Using Blockchain” which addresses the problem of traditional applications’ security risk management (SRM) using blockchain as a countermeasure solution and the SRM of blockchain-based applications. In the digital realm, software security has the utmost importance in making […]

The cornerstone of democracy is the right for voters to participate in free and fair elections. However, securing elections is a non-trivial task due to the conflicting security requirements.  On the one hand, to provide the freedom to vote, it should not be possible to coerce voters into voting for a specific candidate. Therefore, the […]

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 […]

We are currently in the process of significant changes in the communications paradigms. Among others, one of the changes is moving to cloud-based services instead of using local applications (Office365, Youtube, Spotify, etc.). We can argue about the motivation of this trend, but this allows us to provide the customers with the most up-to-date solutions […]