News

On December 9th, at the University of Tartu’s initiative, the first international business festival sTARTUp Day 2016 will be held. Over 1,000 entrepreneurs, investors, students, and scientists will come together and more than 40 speakers will discuss successful business models.

On November 23 the Institute of Computer Science kicks off a brand new series of seminars on data science which aim to connect scientists and applied approaches from the industry.

Present were ambassadors of Sweden, India, France, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, Ireland, Indonesia, Albania, Macedonia, Belarus, Brazil, USA and Lithuania. Representatives from the Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch, Georgian and Canadian embassies were also in attendance with members of cultural institutes and international organizations.

Five projects have currently received funding from the Archimedes smart specialisation measure, UT is a development partner in three of these. Two projects received funding in the last round, the first studies population mobility on the basis of mobile data and the second aims to create lactic acid bacteria with specific characteristics.

On 26–29 August, the international game developing event Ludum Dare 36 brings to Tartu people with a desire to learn about game development and find a long-term development team with whom to continue working. The event takes place at the same time also in France, Spain, Malaysia, Brazil and the USA. In Estonia the meeting is organised by UT Institute of Computer Science together with Tartu Art School’s 3D specialisation which are united by the organisation for computer game development enthusiasts APT Game Generator.

Students at the Institute of Computer Science create various practical solutions in their Software Project course from mobile and web applications to other software developments. In the last ten years student teams in the course have completed a wide spectre of projects in various different fields from banking and payment solutions to educational tools.

The Estonian Bar Association and the University of Tartu IT Law Programme announced the competition in order to develop solutions that would make it easier for specialists, and for people not practising law, to find answers to questions regarding legal matters.

An international Cyber Security Summer School for doctoral students and young researchers titled “Digital Forensics – Technology and Law” is held in Tallinn from July 3-8, and brings together leading cyber security and IT law practitioners to Estonia from all over the world.

We recently wrapped up the spring edition of the traditional annual student project contest. Submissions were made mainly in the Bachelor’s and Master’s categories with only one submission into the first year Bachelor’s category this time. Altogether we received 14 project submissions and it was a tight race.

The University of Tartu’s new laboratory of computer graphics and virtual reality provides computer scientists and students with world-class hardware to conduct various research projects related to computer graphics and neuroscience. For example, the laboratory creates environments which differ from reality as much as possible to study how the human brain reacts in an unusual situation.

One of the most important tasks of the centre of excellence planned in Estonia is to accelerate the development of new ICT technologies and applying them in the industry by including the private and public sector. On 30 May in Tallinn, during the ICT Week, the public sector, enterprises and university representatives discussed the future plans of the ITEE Centre of Excellence in Digital Connected Economy.

The platform NomadCard by UT computer science students enables access to co-working spaces which can be used for remote working. This idea brought the bachelor’s students first place in this year’s final of the TransferWise Hacktathon, the topic of which was money without borders.

2,279 applications were submitted to the UT’s 19 English-taught bachelor’s and master’s curricula and the integrated curriculum of Medicine. Similarly to previous year, most applications were submitted for IT specialisations: the Computer Science programme received 242 applications from international candidates and 40 from Estonian candidates and the programme of Software Engineering had 277 and 41 applications respectively.

At the conference “Fibre Optic Education”, organised by the Information Technology Foundation for Education last week, the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science’s MOOC “About Programming” was awarded the title for the best e-course of the year. This course is also among the 31 which received the e-course quality mark this year.

The University of Tartu IEEE Student Branch is going to hold a career seminar on Thursday, Apr. 07, 16:00 - 18:00. During the seminar, as the main theme, the following successful entrepreneurs will deliver keynote speeches.

Research predicts that by the year 2020, the European Union needs an additional half a million IT workers. The IT sector in Estonia and Tartu is also looking for additional workforce. On 18 March, a career day is organised at the Institute of Computer Science (Ülikooli 17) where the number of IT enterprises who will introduce their internship and career options is bigger than ever.

Driving home from work, your car informs the heating system that you will be home soon and the heating turns on, or the refrigerator recognises a missing food product and adds it to the shopping list—these are only some examples of how objects will be communicating in the future and making people’s lives more comfortable. Objects’ skill to communicate is the future direction in technology and for developing this, the University of Tartu and Telia Eesti opened Estonia’s internet of things lab.

Breast cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide, affecting one in eight women. There are different types of breast cancer, but one type in particular accounts for almost three quarters of all breast tumors. These tumors feature a receptor for estrogen, and very often become resistant to hormone therapy. Despite their high frequency, these “estrogen receptor-positive” tumors have been difficult to research because the animals we test drugs on are often not relevant to the clinic.

Language technology researchers at UT Institute of Computer Science started cooperation in machine translation with translation agency Grata. The aim of the cooperation is to create a machine translation solution for automatic translation from German and English into Estonian that takes into consideration the needs of the specific translation agency.

Among the 780 teams that participated in the renowned artificial intelligence competition, the team of the University of Tartu returned with fourth place by creating a programme which passes the American 8th grade exam. University of Tartu and Estonia was represented in the Kaggle Allen AI Science Challenge with an 80 000 dollar award fund by doctoral student of computer science Tambet Matiisen and employee of the Institute of Computer Science Tanel Pärnamaa.