Industry Collaboration
One of the main tasks of the University of Tartu is to support the development of a science-based society. This requires strong research, high-quality higher education and effective collaboration with companies and the public sector.
At the Institute of Computer Science, we have developed very diverse collaboration formats for this purpose, which allows companies to start cooperating with the university to the desired extent and volume.
For the fifth year in a row, we are organising public Data Science Seminars for a wider audience where researchers, lecturers, students, alumni and representatives of companies dealing with data science topics pass on their knowledge and experience. We also contribute our expertise to the programs of other events (e.g. sTARTUp Day business festival, Tartu Entrepreneurship Week, etc.) in order to raise awareness of the possibilities of digitalisation and IT solutions.
Every autumn, we post a call for project ideas and datasets from companies for course projects in various subjects where students learn to apply appropriate data science and machine learning methods in order to draw useful conclusions and create models based on the data. For companies, this is a great opportunity to verify an initial hypothesis or try out something they had no time for, on a new dataset.
The Industrial Master’s Programme in IT helps to combine academic learning with practical work at a partner company. This way, we are training top-level data scientists, analysts, software developers and digital product managers, who already during their studies start to apply the latest academic knowledge and ideas for the development of the company.
We have launched the Sandbox design thinking and digital product management programme, which aims to develop design thinking and digital product management education at the University of Tartu and to find solutions to real-life problems in collaboration with partner companies.
We are also constantly increasing our research and development collaboration with various companies, which has been greatly supported by Archimedes' smart specialisation program. For example, we recently launched the Autonomous Driving Lab in collaboration with Bolt.
Key competencies
The greatest potential for collaboration with companies is based on our own research capabilities:
- artificial intelligence and machine learning, incl. deep neural networks
- cyber security and data security
- cryptography and quantum cryptography
- business process modelling and mining
- language technology, incl. machine translation, speech synthesis, etc.
- analysis of biological and health data
- self-driving technologies
- intelligent transport systems and smart city technologies
- distributed systems and scientific calculations
- big data technologies
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- software development, software engineering, open-source software
- coding of information and signals
- data visualisation
- blurred logic, mathematical logic, etc.
- semantics and fault tolerance of programming languages
- e-learning and learning analytics technologies
With the help of the ICT research support measure, we have strengthened research in particular in artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science, robot-human cooperation and the Internet of Things.
Read more about the research groups and labs of the Institute of Computer Science.
Also take a look at our practice and graduation thesis databases for students, where we gather offers from our industry partners.