News

On September 8, the election commissions approved the dean candidates for the University of Tartu’s four faculties. The new deans are elected at the end of September and beginning of October and their term of office begins on 1 January 2016 when the university’s academic units continue as four faculties within the new structure.

The International Student Cluster Competition will take place in Frankfurt next week where the Estonian team will be the only Baltic team. Estonia will be represented by a team of students from the University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science who have been specially trained for the competition by professors, lecturers and doctoral students.

The IT Law Programme invites you to a discussion with a distinguished IT Law and data protection specialist professor Lee Bygrave from Oslo University. He will give his talk on Friday, October 9, 2015, from 14.15 to 17.30 at the Faculty of Law, Näituse 20 room 103. The talk will cover the following topics:

Live stream from the Scandinavian biggest business forum starts on October 1st at 1:00 pm and on October 2nd at 10:00 am. The event is held at UT Oeconmicum (Narva mnt 4), room A 314. The panel of speakers is outstanding. You will have the change to hear:

The research project Usable and Efficient Secure Multi-party Computation led by Cybernetica AS received the highest possible mark from the European Commission in the final assessment. Recommendations by researchers of the University of Tartu Institute of Social Sciences helped the project reach the successful implementation of a secure computation system.

At its meeting of 9 December, the UT strategy committee discussed the location of the future IT development centre. After thorough deliberation of the arguments, it was decided that the preferred location for the centre is the Narva maantee area near Oeconomicum, the academic building of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. The choice was made between two remaining options—the university’s research campus in Maarjamõisa field and the Oeconomicum area on Narva maantee

Cybernetica AS has been awarded a contract with the United States Air Force Research Laboratory to contribute to the Brandeis privacy R&D programme of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Novel Tools for Analyzing Privacy Leakages (NAPLES) project will be carried out by Cybernetica with the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Tartu as a subcontractor.

AS Eesti Telekom and the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science have signed a cooperation agreement to promote the creation of new business ideas based on research and development work in the field of internet of things. For this, the students’ study environment and options will also be developed and in March the UT smart environment lab will be opened.

The University of Tartu has the largest number of graduates in Estonia—an estimated of 70 000 graduates. Aiming to bring the alumni community closer together, link them more to the university, develop mutual communication and professional cooperation, the University of Tartu launched a network for its alumni (www.utalumni.ee), novel in Estonia as well as Europe, the like of which is also used by the University of Oxford.

University of Tartu announced an architecture competition to find the best solution for the IT centre to be built on Narva Road. The city of Tartu decided to transfer the immovable property next to Oeconomicum to the university for building the centre. The centre will house the Institute of Computer Science, Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, and School of Economics and Business Administration. The building should be as energy efficient as possible.

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 5 July, the University of Tartu Art Museum exhibition “Dissecting a Painting. Portrait of G. F. Parrot” is opened in the rotund of the Old Anatomical Theatre. This is the first opportunity to see the portrait of the well-known rector and professor of physics of the University of Tartu, painted by Franz Gerhard von Kügelgen 200 years ago.

University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science opens a new position in autumn – the professorship of information systems. The new position will be held by current Professor of Software Engineering Marlon Dumas, who is ranked among the world’s top 1% of most cited researchers in the area of computer science.

On 30 June, the inauguration ceremony where rector Professor Volli Kalm takes an oath of office for the new term as the rector will be held in the assembly hall of the University of Tartu.

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.

On 20 June, a cooperation agreement was signed by the Estonian Bar Association and the University of Tartu, aiming to support the development of high-quality Estonian Wikipedia and to appreciate and highlight Estonian-language wiki articles on law and the Bar. The cooperation is a part of the University of Tartu’s Million+ project, which hopes to raise the number of Estonian Wikipedia articles to one million by the year 2020. The prize fund of the article competitions is 3000 euros.

A master’s thesis defended in the University of Tartu’s Department of Philosophy claims that top athletes, who more and more often attract media interest even outside the sports sphere, should also behave more morally than the so-called average person outside the training and competition period.

The University of Tartu’s patented strain of lactic acid bacterium Lactobacillus fermentum ME-3 gains more and more popularity in the world. Food supplements containing ME-3 have so far been sold in 12 countries; in April a new supplement made it to the Australian market. Scientists are looking for new areas of use for the friendly bacteria.

From 22 to 26 May, the researcher and visionary in educational management and innovation Professor Thomas Hatch from Columbia University is visiting Tartu and will hold two seminars for doctoral students, their supervisors and for everyone who is interested.

On 14 June at 15:00 the Genome Centre’s information day is held in the assembly hall of the University of Tartu, where experts explain what can be done with genetic data and how the data gathered in the course of research study can become valuable for ordinary people.