News

Student Startup Camp was held in Tartu last week for a 5th successful time. Garage48, the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science and IdeaLab provided an excellent working atmosphere for the 100 students taking part in the camp, who had a busy week of building ideas into prototypes.

The Marketing Office of the University of Tartu conducted a survey among international degree students in summer 2017. The purpose of the survey was to help understand how current international students made their decision to come to study in Estonia. Total number of respondents was 176, 84% of whom were master’s and 16% bachelor’s students. Most of the respondents came from Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Finland, USA, Nigeria, Germany, Latvia or Azerbaijan.

With great sorrow, the University of Tartu announces the unexpected death of Rector Volli Kalm on Saturday, December 23. Volli Kalm was born on February 10, 1953 in Vändra. He graduated from the University of Tartu in 1976 with a degree in geology. In 1984, Kalm earned his PhD in geology from the Estonian Academy of Sciences after successfully defending his doctoral thesis "Formation, composition and usage of glaciofluvial deposits in Estonia." From 1988-1989, he attended postdoctoral studies in the geology department of the University of Alberta.

At the extraordinary senate session on 27 December, the senate of the University of Tartu unanimously appointed professor Tõnu Lehtsaar as the acting rector. In his speech to the senate, Lehtsaar said that his primary goal as the university’s acting rector is to maintain stability and find a new rector. “We will keep the university going. I asked members of the Rector’s Office at the meeting this morning if they were willing to continue in their office. I didn’t expect them to answer right away, but they confirmed that we will go forward together,” he said.

Professor Volli Kalm, Rector of the University of Tartu (10 February 1953 – 23 December 2017)

Friday, December 1 2017 marks the 98th birthday of the Estonia’s national university in Tartu. To celebrate the event, several events take place during the week-long celebrations – honorary doctorates and doctorates are conferred, the University’s honorary member named and the laurate of The University of Tartu Award for Contribution to Estonian National Identity named.

On Friday, November 10, a 48-hour "Social Impact Data Hack 2017" will begin at the University of Tartu, which explores the possibilities of contributing to society by using big data from various public institutions and private enterprises.

Meelis Luht, former management board member of Eesti Meedia Group, will start work as the Director of Administration of the University of Tartu on 21 August. Rector Volli Kalm said the new director of administration has been in charge of several different areas of activity in his career and is a top leader with international work experience. We can see his capability as well as his desire and ambition to actively contribute to the implementation of the university’s development goals.

The University of Tartu was one of the two Central and Eastern European universities to enter the Times Higher Education Rankings table in computer science. In computer science, UT is ranked among the top 250 universities in the world. Furthermore, the head of Institute of Computer Science Prof. Jaak Vilo was elected as the board member of Informatics Europe.

As a result of a naming competition, the new academic and research building of the Institute of Computer Science, the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics and the School of Economics and Business Administration to be completed in autumn 2019, will be named Delta.

The University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science and PerkinElmer, Inc., a global leader committed to innovating for a healthier world, have entered into a scientific cooperation agreement. The aim of this collaboration is to investigate the possibilities of developing methods of machine learning in order to create systematic analysis tools for microscopic images of cells used in scientific research.

On 29 June, the IT executives of Swedbank Group visited the University of Tartu to discuss cooperation opportunities and share information about the future plans of the bank and the university. Last Thursday, on 29 June, the top IT executives of Swedbank Group led by Head of Group IT Anders Ekedahl met the rector and vice rectors of the University of Tartu and lecturer of information systems Fredrik Payman Milani to discuss cooperation, each other’s interests and plans for the future.

In a recently published article, Tartu scientists showed that unless an individual’s genetic descent is taken into account, his or her DNA-based estimation of disease risk may provide incorrect results. In the case of many complex diseases, for example the coronary heart disease and the type 2 diabetes, the disease risk is not affected by one or two, but thousands or even tens of thousands of gene markers available in the human hereditary substance, DNA. Each one of them has a relatively small effect if taken separately but the aggregate impact is considerable.

On 8 February, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves awarded by way of exception two Young Scientist Awards. The prize was given to UT mycologist Leho Tedersoo and media and communication researcher Andra Siibak. Graduate of the Institute of Computer Science Dan Bogdanov was given the Young IT Scientist Award. Leho Tedersoo is Senior Research Fellow in Ecology of Biological Interactions at the University of Tartu. In a short period of time he has founded his own research group and become an internationally acknowledged mycologist.

On Friday evening, University of Tartu teams took the two first places at the final competition of an exclusive NGAL® business development program. Among ten student teams from Estonia and USA, Cody was selected to be the winner and got 3,000 USD to implement their idea. The second place and 2,000 USD went to the Coulomb Sailing Group.

As of autumn 2017, students of the international master’s curricula of Software Engineering and Computer Science can apply for the Cybernetica scholarship programme. The scholarship is 5000 euros per year, which is so far the highest scholarship to be paid monthly to IT students in the University of Tartu. The scholarship also involves paid summer internship in Cybernetica AS. The programme gives a unique opportunity to selected students to participate during studies in research projects in one of the leading research and development companies in Estonia.

On 24 April at 16.15 the lecture “The Era of Algorithms” will be delivered in the series of Granö lectures by the professor of computer science of the University of Helsinki Esko Ukkonen, who explores the limits and possibilities of algorithms.

From 19–20 April 2017 the Estonian Language Technology 2017 conference will be held in Tallinn. On 18 April, the day before the conference, several interesting workshops are organised. One of these is the machine translation hackathon, which tests how machines can contribute to the development of Wikipedia.

Similarly to last year, the highest-ranking is linguistics (101–150), and the same position is held by philosophy, which has re-entered the ranking list after 2015. These disciplines are followed by communication and media studies, represented in the ranking for the sixth year in succession, and archaeology (both on the position 151–200). Among five larger faculties, the highest position – 301st – is held by arts and humanities.

A student team from the University of Tartu is the only one from Estonia to get through to the ACM programming contest held December 3-4 in Russia, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Recently the same team was also awarded third place in the International IEEE Xtreme programming contest, which so far is the best result in Estonia and the whole of Baltics.