Dr Abela is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Artificial Intelligence within the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta. He has an MSc in Computer Science in which he mainly focused on conversational case-based reasoning. In his doctoral research, he focused on the area of knowledge work and information management support measures inspired by human forgetting.
During his doctoral research he spent time working as a research assistant in the Digital Research Enterprise Ireland (DERI), now the Insight research center for data analytics.
His current research interests include the areas of enterprise knowledge graphs and graph representation learning, and how these can be leveraged upon to realize digital transformation processes within the context of humanities, healthcare and manufacturing.
In this regards he has led several research collaborations involving governmental entities and industry.
AMPS (AI meets the Maltese Courts) Oct 2023 - Present This project is funded by the Malta Council for Science & Technology and is a joined initiative between the Faculty of Laws (Department of Public Law), and the Faculty of Information & Communication Technology (Department of Artificial Intelligence) with the scope being that of investigating the use of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to predict the outcome of Maltese court cases, specifically those within the Small Claims Tribunal.
medicX-KE: Knowledge Graph based Explainability for Drug-Drug Interactions Sep 2022 - Present This research is funded through the MDIA, AI Applied Research Grant. The aim behind the medicX-KE project is to extend the existing medicX system with explainability (based on deep graph models) related to drug-drug interactions. We will furthermore make medicX-KE easily accessible, and the data holistically searchable, for healthcare professionals.
Autonomous Diagnostic System Aug 2021 - December 2022 Research in collaboration with Corel Malta Ltd. and funded through Malta Enterprise R&D scheme 2014-2020. We are developing a prototype that leverages on Graph-based learning to detect anomalies. The prototype will lead to the creation of a plug-in for one of the company’s flagship products, namely the Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS). Parallels RAS publishes applications and delivers remote desktops and virtual desktop infrastructure to any device in a network from any location, allowing employees to access and use applications and data from any device.
Notarypedia Mar 2018 - Apr 2020 This project was done in collaboration with the Notarial Archives in Valletta and the Office of the Notary to Government is focused on research and development of a number of services intended to make the historical archive accessible beyond the archive’s walls. We developed a platform that leverages on Artificial Intelligence techniques to automatically extract data from the manuscripts and harvest this data in Notarypedia’s Knowledge Graph. We have furthermore developed a suite of tools to support the Notarial Archives’ staff in creating and maintaining a catalogue of the available documents.
