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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The original article (in Estonian) by Airika Harrik was published in Novaator. Estonia has used the ID card system as a means to identify its citizens for almost 20 years. During those years, several security issues have emerged. A new PhD dissertation from the University of Tartu has shed light on those issues and pointed […]

On Friday, August 28 Janno Siim defended his PhD thesis „Non-Interactive Shuffle Arguments„ A fundamental requirement for all democratic governments is a secure voting system. In recent years some countries, like Estonia and Switzerland, have adopted internet voting (i-voting), and many more have experimented (e.g., Norway and Australia) or have plans to adopt it in […]

On the 13th of August Karim Baghery defended his PhD thesis „Reducing trust and improving security in zk-SNARKs and commitments„ in which he studied the zk-SNARKs from two different perspectives, namely reducing trust in their setup phase and improving their security in different applications. On the need for proof systems People frequently are asked to […]

From 1st to 5th July 2019 the annual Cyber Security Summer School (C3S), which was organized by the Institute of Computer Science, took place in Voore, Estonia. The topic of the C3S was “Blockchain: Applications and Security”. The main objective included an introduction of the key concepts, principles and techniques on the blockchain technology, their […]

On the 12th of June, Toomas Krips defended his PhD on „Improving performance of secure real-number operations“ in which he describes methods on how to improve real-number computations on secure computations. In the following blog post, Toomas tells a story on secure computations, real numbers and his doctoral thesis. There are two main components of […]