Institute of Digital Games Recognised as Leading Research Centre in Game AI and Technology

The Institute of Digital Games - University of Malta ranks among the global top 5 research institutions active in technical games research in the most recent rankings released this year. The University of Malta is ranked between tech research giants Queen Mary University of London and Google with University of California Santa Cruz securing the top spot. 

The Institute of Digital Games and the Game Artificial Intelligence research group at the University of Malta first entered the list in 2018 in ninth place. Over the last few years, they have ranked in the top ten consistently which is a remarkable achievement for a small research group at the University of Malta.

Dr Daniel Vella, Director of the Institute of Digital Games, emphasised the importance of the recognition in putting the University of Malta on the international research map. "This achievement is the result of the dedication and innovation of our researchers and students. We’re really proud to be ranked alongside other world-class institutions in our contributions to these fields of innovation and research," he stated.

‘This recognition demonstrates that with a strong focus on excellence and innovation, world-class research can thrive in Malta," reiterated Prof. Simon Fabri, Pro-Rector for Research & Knowledge Transfer at the University of Malta.

The rankings, developed by Mark J. Nelson, Professor of Computer Science at American University, take into account how active institutions have been in the past 10 years in publishing at conferences and journals dedicated to the technical portion of games and interactive entertainment research, covering topics such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and graphics.

While the ranking is based on quantity of publications, there is no shortage of quality as Nemanja Rasajski and Chintan Trivedi, PhD students at the Institute of Digital Games, won the NVIDIA Best Paper Award at the 2024 European Conference on Computer Vision and Dr Konstantinos Makantasis, Kosmas Pinitas and Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis, researchers at the Institute of Digital Games and Faculty of ICT, were awarded Runner-up Best Paper of 2024 from the highly prestigious IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

The Institute of Digital Games offers the Master of Science in Digital Games and Doctoral Degrees in the areas of Game AI, Game Design, and Game Studies at the University of Malta. More information is available on their website.

For more information about research and interviews please contact digitalgames@um.edu.mt.