Uudised

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.

The university reputation survey by TNS Emor assured that, for already the eighth year, the most reputable university in Estonia is the University of Tartu. The recent survey outlines the attitudes of young people regarding UT: 15–19-year-olds, the current and future applicants, valued highly the university’s success and quality of education.

With the aim to develop Tartu’s university campus into an open, higher quality environment which supports innovation, the University of Tartu Department of Geography’s Mobility Lab uses smart phones and interviews to study how students, employees of the university and other creative establishments use the urban space in relation to the location of academic buildings or the workplace.

The delegation of the International Relations sector of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, will visit Estonia on 2 and 3 May to get information about the circle of industry, research and decision makers in Estonia and establish direct contact for possible accession talks. In order for Estonian enterprises to be internationally more competitive, they need to produce more high-technology products with high added value. High added value means bigger salaries, bigger investments and bigger profit.

Until the end of May 2016, the exhibition “Watt d’or” is displayed in the foyer of the UT Physicum (W. Ostwald 1). The exhibition introduces energy saving projects created and implemented in Switzerland. At the annual renowned “Watt d’or” competition, the Swiss Federal Office of Energy recognises the best innovations in five categories: society, energy technologies, renewable energy, energy-efficient mobility, and buildings and space.

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.

Researching and using natural resources is once again at the centre of attention, bringing plenty of information pollution and false information. UT development fund allocated 100,000 euros to the Earth Resources Centre (MAREK) of the Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences which has engaged researchers from different fields to clarify several questions related to Earth resources.

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.

On Monday, 18 April 2016, Rector of the University of Helsinki Professor Jukka Kola and Professor Markku Kulmala visited Tartu to make an interim report with leaders and researchers of the University of Tartu, Estonian University of Life Sciences and Tartu Observatory on cooperation in the framework of the Estonian research roadmap object “Estonian Environmental Observatory”.

From the six works submitted, the University of Tartu chose the architectural solution called ICONICUM for the IT centre to be built on Narva road. The authors of the idea will be revealed on 19 April 2016 at 15:00 in the University Café, when the envelopes with the name cards of the winning project will be opened.

It is possible to apply for the English-taught master’s curricula at the UT Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Faculty of Social Sciences, the integrated curriculum of Medicine and the Faculty of Science and Technology’s bachelor’s curriculum Science and Technology until midnight on Friday, 15 April. Admission to the master’s curricula of the Faculty of Science and Technology has already ended.

Tartu Observatory in cooperation with the Tartu Hansa Rotary and University of Tartu Youth Academy announce that applications are now open for the summer camp Science Task Force held in July - August 2016. The Youth Development Fund of the Tartu Hansa Rotary Club will award up to five participants of the Science Task Force a 600-euro fellowship. The fellowship is meant to cover the expenses related to participation in the program, for example, the cost of food and accommodation.

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.

The University of Tartu is the only university in the Baltic states which is represented in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2016 with six subjects. Of the six UT subjects on the list, linguistics (101–150) and computer science and information systems (401–450) are new entries in high places.

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.

Icosagen Cell Factory, a spin-off company from the University of Tartu, received a prestigious SME grant within the framework of Horizon 2020, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, in which the European Commission hand-picks businesses to invest in and support. A total of 30 projects out of 1090 submitted proposals under Phase 2 were selected in the last call, with the cut-off date being 25 November 2015.

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.