Institute of Digital Games wins Outstanding Transnational Collaboration Award

RECLAIM, a Horizon Europe project, was awarded the Outstanding Transnational Collaboration Award 2025 from Xjenza Malta during the R&I Expo 2025. Prof. Antonios Liapis received the award on behalf of RECLAIM’s local team which included Prof. Georgios Yannakakis, Dr Iro Voulgari and PhD students Konstantinos Sfikas and Nemanja Rasajski.

Training AI with a recycling game
RECLAIM brought together 10 very different institutions (researchers, industries, non-profits, and a municipality) to develop a portable, robotic material recovery facility for small-scale material recovery. The Institute’s role was to connect the project with citizen science. The connection to citizen science was made by developing a game, RECLAIM Recycling Data Game, that uses images from the portable material facility's conveyor belt (used for optical sorting) and shows them to players. Players annotate where, what, and how many objects of each material are in the image, with the goal of improving the AI that runs the material facility.

International research in Procedural Content Generation

Matthew Barthet, PhD student at the Institute of Digital Games shows OPtiMaL research to Xjenza Malta CEO

During this year’s EXPO, Xjenza Malta showcased more than 35 projects covering a diverse range of themes including blue & green economy, sustainability, engineering, health and wellbeing and ICT. The Institute of Digital Games showcased their work on the SINO-MALTA Fund project OPtiMaL (Online Procedural Content Generation via Multi-objective Optimisation and Learning). Researchers from the University of Malta and SUSTech, China explored generative AI algorithms capable of creating multimodal content with multi-dimensional diversity, which is aware of human behaviour and adapts to human experience.

Visitors to the EXPO included students from a number of Maltese schools who had the opportunity to test the games used for the OPtiMaL Project where they were able to compare their engagement and expertise with that of the test data. In the case of the racing game the students had a chance to demo, the test data could then be used to procedurally generate racetracks that would give the player a particular playing experience and tailor it to their level of expertise.

The findings of the OPtiMaL research visitors of the expo were able to try out were published in Proceedings of Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction and Nature Scientific Data. Over 35 publications in premiere venues such as IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems developed from this research collaboration, with some research even receiving awards at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2024).

Leading international research in game AI
Check out the OPtiMaL website to get a full overview publications. It is testament to the strength of bringing together one of the leading centres of Al in games research worldwide - Institute of Digital Games, Malta - and one of the world's leading research groups in computational intelligence - SUSTech, China.