Course projects

The software project course seeks partner companies with a problem or idea that needs software application development but is missing developers. In the project, our final year IT students team up and build partnering companies a suitable IT solution using knowledge from their studies. The best part is the solution is for our partners to keep. 

Teams will carry out the project between 4 September and 18 December. Each team will consist of four highly motivated students who will collectively spend at least 600 hours on the project.

If you are interested in proposing a project for our students, we only need a simple one-page description focusing on what IT solution you want, what problem it will solve, and who the user is. Your project description should be written in English. For writing your proposal, please use this Project Proposal Template. 

Find examples of past projects and additional info on the course website.

Project proposals should be sent by 16 September 2024 to Marinos Georgiadis (marinos.georgiadis@ut.ee).

We are seeking partner organisations for our Data Science and Machine Learning courses this autumn. In these courses, students will learn to apply relevant data science and machine learning methods for extracting valuable insights and building models from the data. During the course, the students will form groups (of 3 - 4) to work on a project. We strive to provide our students with practical experience, thus we are looking for a diverse set of projects that represent real-life challenges. It is a great opportunity for the project partners to verify a hypothesis or test a new data set. For the students, it is a good way to learn and gain perspective.

What type of projects are we looking for? We do not have a set list of ideas we wish to see, but keep in mind that the project should be: 

• strongly linked to Machine Learning or Data Science
• important to you and society
• challenging (e.g., no ready-made solutions online)
• doable by students
• accompanied by a relevant dataset or data that can be collected online with little effort.

How much time should partners dedicate? Ideally, the partners would be in contact with our students at the beginning of the project to explain the idea and initial hypothesis about the dataset. However, our lecturers are supervising the projects, too. Partners are more than welcome to attend the final project presentation organised in December. Please note that the students choose the ideas they work with so we cannot guarantee that your project will be chosen. 

Please describe your project idea by filling in the online form. Ideas should be submitted by 25 September.

For more information contact Dmytro Fishman (dmytro.fishman@ut.ee).

Our digital product management program Sandbox is looking for partners to challenge our students in creating and managing digital products. This is a good opportunity for companies and organizations to get a fresh pair of eyes on their problem and find an idea to continue with in the future.

We expect a problem statement or idea related to user experience from the partner, and our student teams conduct background research, and interviews with potential users to create a prototype for the solution. The presented idea or problem should therefore be:

• solvable with a digital product
• doable yet challenging for students
• important to the partner.

During the project, the partner organisations or companies meet with the students three times. The first meeting is at the beginning of the course and the teams discuss the first ideas and thoughts. The second time takes place about a month before the end of the course, and the teams introduce a more robust solution. At the second meeting, the teams will receive additional feedback, which they will take into account in their final presentation. During the course, students may have questions for which they will contact partners, but the organisation can determine how involved it wants to be. The working language of the project is English. 

More information about completed projects can be found on the Sandbox website. For more information, contact Aadi Tegova (aadi.tegova@ut.ee). Ideas should be submitted by 6 September.

All agreements and contracts are made between students and the owner of the project. We can only go so far as to point out the primary legal aspects so that both parties would have an understanding of their rights, as stated by the law.

How are intellectual property rights regulated?

Given that your project bears results, a question naturally arises: whose property is this?

In Estonia, copyright is regulated by the Autoriõiguse seadus (AutÕS) aka the Copyright Act. A copyright for any piece of creative work consists of two aspects:

• the moral rights (AutÕS § 12);
• the economic rights (AutÕS § 13).

Copyright is automatically acquired by the author(s) (i.e., the students) upon the creation of their work. Understandably, you as the project owner might want to do as you please with the work once the student project is finished. For you to have legal rights to do so, you must sign a copyright agreement, in which you will agree the terms of use regarding the work created by the student(s).

There are two alternatives for rights to change hands:

• transferring rights – only applicable to economic rights;
• by granting a license (i.e., by giving a right to exercise rights) – applicable to both moral and economic rights;
  • by granting a non-exclusive license, the author pertains the same rights as the licensee;
  • by granting an exclusive license, the author gives up on the rights entirely (this is comparable to transferring said rights).

Should you wish to have full economic control, you ought to:

• acquire the economic rights;
• acquire a license to exercise the following moral rights:
  • make or permit other persons to make any changes to the work, its title (name) or designation of the author’s name and the right to contest any changes made without the author’s consent (right of integrity of the work) (AutÕS § 12 lg 1 p 3);
  • permit the addition of other authors’ works to the author’s work (illustrations, forewords, epilogues, comments, explanations, additional parts, etc.) (right of additions to the work) (AutÕS § 12 lg 1 p 4);
  • decide when the work is ready to be performed in public (right of disclosure of the work) (AutÕS § 12 lg 1 p 6);
• acquire the right to grant sublicenses which enables the licensee to – in turn – bestow third parties with licenses to use the work;
• acquire a confirmation from the author(s) that they will not exercise the remaining moral rights in a way that would interfere with exercising the economic rights.

What else to bear in mind when signing a copyright agreement?

• To avoid any misunderstandings, all agreements should be made before the collaboration begins.
• A copyright agreement must contain the following (AutÕS § 41¹ lg 1):
  • description of the work (form, scope, name, etc.);
  • rights that are transferred, rights that are licensed, the type of licenses (non-exclusive or exclusive), right to granting sublicenses;
  • the manner and territory of using the work;
  • expiration of the copyright agreement and time of entry into force.

How to ensure data confidentiality?

Supposing that your project involves sensitive data and you want to positively make sure that it does not reach any third parties, it would be wise to sign a confidentiality agreement aka an NDA (non-disclosure agreement).

An NDA should posit the following:

• what exactly is regarded as confidential information in terms of the project;
• how is confidentiality enforced (cont