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 […]

Mohamed Abdelrahman shares his journey as a PhD student in the Data Systems Group at the University of Tartu, where he focuses on Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) and aims to make AI more trustworthy and accessible. His story was introduced by Professor Jaak Vilo, Head of the Institute of Computer Science. Describe your thoughts when […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]