Estonian IT Summer School takes place for the 20th time

Today starts the three-day IT Summer School ESSCaSS (Estonian Summer School on Computer and Systems Science), which brings more than 120 researchers, doctoral students and students from Estonia and abroad to the Delta Centre.

The summer school’s keynote speakers are top international scientists Anders Søgaard from the University of Copenhagen, Toon Calders from the University of Antwerp, Marc Hanheide from the University of Lincoln, Vashek Matyáš from Masaryk University and Sadok Ben Yahia from Tallinn University of Technology. In addition, the doctoral students and researchers participating in the summer school give talks and make poster presentations. The programme also includes workshops by Autonomous Driving Lab.

This year's summer school focuses on currently relevant topics of AI, autonomous robots, sustainable mobility, and information security. Each visiting lecturer gives a comprehensive overview of the current situation in their field and their research. In artificial intelligence, the most interesting questions are about trustworthiness and fairness and the recent developments in language models. The focus in robotics is on how autonomous robots shape their behaviour over time in a dynamic and changing environment. In information security, we focus on the electronic identification of people. In addition, we explore how the green transition can reduce transport emissions.

According to Professor Jaak Vilo, the chief organiser of the event, the first summer school in the series took place in 2002. "The goal was a high-level scientific summer school with a more practical focus to bring together doctoral students in IT and researchers and encourage younger students to choose a research career. So this year, ESSCaSS takes place for the 20th time; we only skipped two years due to Covid-19," Vilo said. "When we had 50–80 participants, we organised the summer school at various places in Estonia. Now, for the second time, we are back in the Delta academic building, which has Estonia's most modern learning environment and enough space to hold a summer school. The number of participants has rocketed in the last two years and now exceeds more than 120," he said, explaining the choice of venue.

The chief organiser of the long-standing summer school is the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu.

More information about the summer school is available on the event website.