News

Opening ceremony of the new academic year starts on Monday, 4 September at 10:00 in the university assembly hall. Salutatory addresses are delivered by rector Volli Kalm and the mayor of Tartu Urmas Klaas. In the 2017/2018 academic year, nearly 4000 students start their studies in UT at all study levels.

September 4-5, 2017 the European Company Law and Corporate Governance Conference will take place in Tallinn to discuss necessary changes in the existing EU company law. The conference is planned to cover three different areas of interest: the digital company law, the cross-border mobility of companies (cross-border mergers, divisions and transfers of registered office i.e. conversions) and applicable law in company law matters.

You can find the program from the conference page.

Tongji University (Shanghai) and University of Tartu Summer School in Economics On the 7th and 8th of August, a delegation from Tongji University (Shanghai, PRC) visited University of Tartu School of Economics and Business Administration. This was the second doctoral seminar since Tongji is an official partner university. The previous event took place 27-28th of March 2017, in Tongji.

Tartu Observatory researcher and former ESTCube Program leader Andris Slavinskis is participating in NASA’s Exchange Visitor Program for one-year period at NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Slavinskis is working in the Mission Design Division at Ames to study advanced concepts for future NASA missions that could use small satellites for interplanetary exploration.

On 7 August, the University of Tartu School of Economics and Business Administration starts moving to the former National Archives building in Liivi Street to operate there until the new academic and research building Delta is completed.

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.

4 offers were made for the tender for finishing the construction work of the University of Tartu Library. The winner of the public tender was AS Ehitustrust and OÜ Tallinna Ehitustrust, which made a joint offer in the amount of 5.75 million euros (plus VAT).

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.

From 10 to 14 July, the 14th conference of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLC14) is held in the University of Tartu. The conference “Linguistic Diversity and Cognitive Linguistics” brings to Tartu nearly 500 participants from 50 countries all over the world.

Jan Richard Bærug, who recently defended his PhD at the University of Tartu, analysed the attitude of 691 newspapers and niche magazines of northern Europe to the merging of journalism and advertising. He found that three quarters of all analysed publications agreed to publish unlabelled marketing texts. According to Bærug, such hybridisation of journalism is a problem as it may weaken democracy.

From 7 to 14 July, academic staff and doctoral students from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and North India participate in the University of Tartu summer school. At the summer school in Tartu, participants learn about new research methods in environmental health and epidemiology, which they can use to conduct similar studies in their home universities.

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.

The master’s thesis by Annika Liivamägi, a graduate of Service Design and Management in the University of Tartu Pärnu College, explains that customers who leave the online shop before completing their purchase are not necessarily a problem for the retailer but may involve a positive opportunity instead.

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.

The admission period for most Estonian-language bachelor’s and master’s curricula in the University of Tartu ended last week. Application for English-taught curricula took place in spring. In total, the university received more than 12,100 applications for admission to Estonian and English curricula of all study levels.

On Sunday, November 9th at 11:30-19:00 at the UT Economics Faculty (Narva mnt 4-A314, Tartu) takes place University of Tartu Idea Lab "Idea Killing Sunday". What is happening? - Different tracks for newcomers, Vega teams, and active Tramm11 teams. - Meeting with mentors from different fields - Training and practice about building a minimum viable product: example of the landing page - Pitching competition

Konstantin Tretjakov, Research Fellow in Bioinformatics at the University of Tartu, won the third place at the international competition of big data analytics TEXATA among more than 2000 competitors.

Erasmus exchange students of the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu have demonstrated that it is possible to fully take over the control of commercial drones. Weak drone security leads to cyber attack opportunities against drones.

The European Union has emphasised that Europe needs new and geographically more dispersed centres of excellence in research. Proceeding from that, the UT, the TUT and the University of Edinburgh submitted a proposal to the European Union to create the IT competence centre in Estonia. The idea to create the centre of excellence was successful in the first round of the competition.