https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/41695 Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:18:53 GMT 2026-04-06T15:18:53Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/123340 Title: Open source activities social network Abstract: Through this Final Year Project, we wanted to study whether using a software engineering approach and intelligent techniques, we could implement a system that would help committees and organising teams in their daily running. Through the various requirement gathering techniques used and the background literature review that were carried out, we were able to come out and implement a system which aims to specifically do so. In the evaluation of the system we see that by the use of the Agile software development life cycle we were able to build prototypes which then made up a very robust system, with very few little bugs being reported during the beta testing. We were also able to implement the system in a way to be as easy to use as possible, which was depicted by our users themselves. By the use of the recommendation engine, we were able to give personalised recommendations to the users in order to tempt them to contribute to other similar events. During the focus group interview that was carried out, we were able to conclude that it served as a great addition to our social networking site. Even more, having gathered the users Facebook likes, the engine was able to compute better recommendations. Last but not least, in order to help committees we had to evaluate the three main features that were introduced in CALBUD: the Document Management System, Meeting Management System and the Group Chat. All of these were rated with a high rating from the beta testers, and during the focus group interview we were able to depict that by the use of the meeting management system and the document management system, committees will lose less time during the meetings themselves. This is since the system allows them to prepare and approve the agenda and minutes collaboratively and also allows them to annotate on media files. Description: B.SC.(HONS)ICT Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/123340 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/100948 Title: Fusing and recommending news reports using graph-based entity-relation representations Abstract: When an event occurs in the real world, news reports describing this event start to appear on news sites on the World Wide Web within a few minutes of the occurrence of that event. If the event is significant, numerous news reports will appear on different sites, and each report will give its own description of the event based on the sources of information available to its author. Moreover, as time passes, each news site may publish new reports related to that event that will contain information that has just been discovered. For a person to obtain all the details related to a particular event, he/she will have to read through all the reports covering that event. The multitude of news reports being published on a continuous basis on the World Wide Web also presents an issue of information overload on users. A user would need to sift through a huge number of news reports to identify those reports that are of interest to him/her. News aggregator web sites may cluster related news reports, but they do not attempt to fuse the reports into a single document that contains all of the pertinent information about a single event without any repetition. Such web sites also tend to display news reports chronologically, and a user who tracks an event over the course of several days must sift through them to identify previously unread material. Tracker news reports tend to repeat information that the user may have already read. Some news aggregator web sites and other web services will alert users to breaking news about types of events, or more typically, about news involving a named entity or event type (e.g. earthquake). However, the user must generally intervene to provide details of the entity or event type to track. In this thesis, we tackle a number of research problems: in theory, a user can identify any RSS feed as a source of news he/she would like to receive; we then cluster reports about related news received from the separate RSS feeds as they arrive; we fuse the reports into a single document, trying to preserve a logical order in which sub-events occur and eliminating repetition; new reports related to an existing cluster are integrated into the fused document; the user's interaction with a fused report is monitored in such a way that information that the user has already read is summarised so that in the next visit the user can focus on the new (novel) news; a user model is maintained to automatically identify entities and event types that appear to be of interest to the user so that he/she can be automatically alerted if a related new event occurs. We have developed the JNews news portal to implement our approach and to provide an evaluation platform to measure its ability to: i) cluster related news reports from disparate sources; ii) fuse related reports into a coherent document with minimal or no repetition but preserving all the information contained in the source reports; iii) provide an adaptive reading environment that automatically summarises information in reports that have already been read; iv) automatically identify entities and event types that the user is likely to be interested in based on their past interactions with JNews to make personalised recommendations about previously unread breaking news. As we do not know the number of clusters in advance, JNews uses a modified K-Means clustering algorithm. We represent information contained in news reports using a simplified version of Sowa's Conceptual Graphs. The graph representing a news event contains entities and their relationships. Information from related news reports is merged into a single graph. We keep track of the source sentences that express the relationships. The fused report is generated using the maximally expressive set of sentences, i.e. the sentences that contain most information about the entities and their relationships in the news report, and ensuring that all entities and relationships are expressed in the fused document. The advantage of using a simplified conceptual graph as the logical representation is that the entities and their relationships are represented canonically. We use the same graph to extract underlying patterns in information about types of events and/ or entities. If a user tends to read different fused reports about the same entity or event type then we can recommend similar breaking news to the user. In addition, we can recommend news using collaborative techniques. The user model is represented as a vector of weighted keywords. We use a summarisation technique, whereby the repetition of information across different documents is considered to be an indication of salience of that information, to present summaries of a fused report (containing only the most important information) that have already been read by a user. All components of JNews were designed to run fast without excessive computational resources so as to function well in an operational environment and be able to handle large amounts of data. The evaluation of JNews is performed on its three main components the Document Clustering Component, the Document Fusion Component, and the Information Filtering (recommendation) Component. The Document Clustering Component was evaluated using three different datasets. We found that our Document Clustering Component is very good in performing fine-grained clustering, but performs rather poorly when performing coarser-grained clustering. The Document Fusion component was evaluated using a set of news reports downloaded from MSNBC News that cite their sources, and also using human evaluation. We show that the Document Fusion component is able. to capture most of the information found across different source documents whilst maintaining readability. A corpus of news reports downloaded from Yahoo! News is used to evaluate the Information Filtering component. The results obtained are better than the baseline Rocchio algorithm without negative feedback. Description: PH.D.ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/100948 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/95820 Title: Implementing a compiler/interpreter for Pi-Calculus Abstract: We consider Pi-Calculus as the foundation of our study, by analyzing the syntax and semantics that this notation offers. We then describe a simple typing convention that will be used to type-check Pi-Calculus programs. This is followed by the description of an intermediate representation of the Pi-Calculus, and we suggest how serval machine implementations can use this representation to simulate Pi-Calculus programs. A parser and compiler are constructed. These will translate Pi-Calculus program into this intermediate representation. Subsequently, we concentrate on David N. Turner's Abstract Machine, to develop a Stand-Alone Virtual Machine capable of interpreting Pi-Calculus, and simulating a correct execution on the semantic meaning of the given program. We tackle a number of optimizations that are incorporated with the architecture of the Stand-Alone machine, to produce a more efficient simulation. We present the architecture for an Interactive Virtual Machine to allow a user to communicate with the program during execution, and we give an illustration on the differences between a Stand-Alone virtual machine and an Interactive virtual machine. We then verify the correctness of the virtual machines' implementations, by presenting a number of examples. We conclude by examining the capability of the Interactive virtual machine, in creating an abstract layer between the implementation details of Pi-Calculus programs and the user. We illustrate how a typical user is unable to distinguish between two Pi-Calculus programs, that offer the same functionalities, but have a different internal implementation. Description: B.SC.ICT(HONS)ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/95820 2006-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/95804 Title: Aircraft autoland system using fuzzy logic Abstract: A full aircraft Autoland system using fuzzy logic has been developed. It is based on the flight model of a medium sized commercial airliner (Boeing 73 7-800), and was designed for a full 6 degree of freedom flight simulator. This was achieved by implementing several independent single output Fuzzy Controllers that are able to work together based on instrument readings continuously taken from the aircraft. Scenarios the solution was tested in include varying glidepath angles, various weather situations that include severe stable crosswinds and severe gusting crosswinds. For each case, the final results show that not only were safe landings performed in cases where the conditions were within the limitations set by the aircraft's manufacturer but also in worse conditions. These include landing in airports with a steep glidepath angle (such as London City Airport) but also landing in extreme crosswind conditions nearly double that of what the manufacturers recommend is used as a limitation. Description: B.Sc. IT (Hons)(Melit.) Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/95804 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z