The University of Malta participated in the Digital Assembly Expo which was held recently at the Mediterranean Conference Centre in Valletta.
Exhibits presented fell within four themes: Digital transformation towards a smarter society and nation, Next generation digital education, Digitisation of the manufacturing industry and Leveraging on technology for innovation and disruption.
Transport Research
Research in transport was presented by the Department of Systems and Control Engineering. This focused mainly on urban mobility and its impact on the Maltese islands with the aim to both analyse current behaviour and develop novel solutions. Urban transportation is a major contributor to worsening air quality in towns and villages. The Department of System and Control Engineering has embarked on projects to quantitatively study the relationship between transportation and air quality. Researchers strive to collaborate with the relevant authorities and other institutes both locally and abroad to expand the research horizons through technical expertise and studies.
VaTIS (Valletta Travel Information Service)
The islands of Malta introduced a road pricing scheme in 2007 called the Controlled Vehicular Access (CVA) system in the capital city Valletta. The system is based on camera technology that capture vehicles entering and exiting the charging area which identify the owner and charge according to time spent in the charging zone. For nine years the system has been gathering data about car travel into the city but little or no efforts were made to use the data to provide user feedback or travel information. The Valletta Travel Information Service (VaTIS) aims to extend the sensor technology around the city beyond the road pricing cameras to Bluetooth sensors and crowdsourcing through a smartphone and web application which is capable of collecting travel information and relay feedback to users. This project is ongoing and the initial phases have seen the use of data from the CVA system and the development of the app. The first phase of VaTIS was conceived by Prof. Alexiei Dingli (Mayor of Valletta and Head, Department of Artificial Intelligence) and Prof. Maria Attard (Director, Institute for Climate Change & Sustainable Development) and funded by Transport Malta. The next phase of VaTIS is being funded through a €20 million CIVITAS project called DESTINATIONS.
Biometrics and Digital Forensics
Recent terrorist attacks have raised the need to equip security and law enforcement agencies to help them in the quest to combat crime and terrorism. Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems are being used in several countries to combat crime. However, the quality of the captured footage often hinders their use, since it is very difficult to identify humans when their face is captured by a small number of pixels, especially when the video footage is compressed, the face is in a non-frontal pose and the subject is partially occluded. Moreover, descriptions of eyewitnesses and victims are generally used to draw a composite sketch of the suspect and distribute. However, existing face recognition methods able to achieve remarkable recognition performance on natural facial images, achieve very poor performance in recognising individuals from their corresponding face.
Several researchers at the University of Malta have been working for the past four years to develop software that can be used to restore faces from CCTV quality images, restoration of iris images for security applications, image editing software able to restore occluded facial regions and an automated face sketch recognition (see Figure below for some examples). These methods have pushed forward the current state of the art. A number of demos were presented during the Digital Assembly 2017.
Institute of Aerospace Technologies Research
The exhibit of the Institute of Aerospace Technologies (IAT) was part of Theme 4 (Leveraging on technology for innovation and disruption) and showcased some of the technologies developed by its researchers in the area of flight deck interface design, aircraft trajectory optimisation, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS). The Institute was represented by IAT academics Dr Robert Camilleri and Dr Ing. Jason Gauci.
Three main projects of the Institute of Digital Games
The Institute of Digital Games, represented by Dr Owen Sacco and Mr Jasper Schellekens, exhibited three main projects at the EU Digital Expo: eCrisis, Crosscult and Something Something Soup Something.
eCrisis
The 3-year eCrisis project aims to enable inclusive education through playful and game-based learning and thereby foster the development of social, civic and intercultural competences such as conflict resolution, creative thinking, and reflective debate in primary and secondary education students.
eCrisis will build upon two award winning games: Village Voices - that was developed during the EU FP7 Siren project—and Iconoscope—that was developed during the EU FP7 C2Learn project.
CrossCult
The Institute of Digital Games focuses on the game design and development intended to lower cultural EU barriers, as well as developing artificial intelligence technologies that provide long-lasting experiences of social learning and entertainment that will help towards the better understanding and re-interpretation of European history.
This will be realized through the participation of 11 partners and 14 associate partners including computer scientists, social sciences and humanity researchers, historians and private companies, from seven European countries.
The 4th pilot site is outdoors in Luxembourg City and Valletta and challenges the visitors’ current perceptions on migration as a contemporary emotive topic and engages people in exploring the past to understand the present.
Something Something Soup Something
Something Something Soup Something is a videogame designed by Dr Stefano Gualeni as a research project funded by a Maltco grant. The game design and artwork was further done by two IDG students.
Something Something Soup Something is meant to convey the idea that, despite our best effort to use the language with precision (i.e. trying to limit ambiguity and conceptual 'noise'), we still are faced with ultimately indefinite, shifting concepts.
It also similarly points the attention of the player on the often unquestioned relationships humans establish with new technologies. It implicitly prompts us to take a more critical stance towards the social impact and the ethical implications of our artificial tools and infrastructures.
Butterfleye: Supporting the Development of Accessible Web Applications for Users with Severe Motor-Impairment
Various accessibility standards and guidelines exist, targeting different disabilities. Nonetheless persons suffering from Severe Motor Disabilities (SMD) are generally excluded from development efforts, mainly because of a lack in accessibility regulations, standards and developer support. This work presents Butterfleye, a novel developer-centric tool that facilitates the development of accessible gaze-driven web applications for SMD users. Butterfleye relies and builds upon a widely adopted open-source front-end framework to incentivise frictionless developer adoption. Low cost eye-tracking devices are also examined to lower barriers for end-user adoption. We present an open-source library developed iteratively over a series of user-centric studies and report initial evidence of, and observations on, its effectiveness with SMD users.
Digital factories for Innovative Product Development (DiFIP)
Dr Ing. Emmanuel Francalanza, Mr Josef Briffa, Mr Paul Cutajar and Mr Alec Fenech from the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (DIME) and CERU attended the Digital EXPO Malta 2017, which was organised as part of the Maltese Presidency of the EU. On display was the Effective Material Manipulator Assistant (EMMA) project. EMMA is a 3D printed robotic manipulator which was designed and built at the DIME as one of this year's final year undergraduate engineering projects. This activity is one from a series of events attended by the Concurrent Engineering Research Unit (CERU) members with the aim of promoting and internationalizing the work done by this research unit, as part of the DiFIP project sponsored by MCST’s Technology Internationalisation Partnership Award Grant No. IPAS-2016-017.
The Impact of Keyboard Layouts on Dwell-Free Eye-Driven Typing Performance
A web-based dwell-free eye-typing tool designed to assist speech and motor impaired individuals to regain their ability to communicate through eye movement. This study considers three standard keyboards; QWERTY, Dvorak and the alphabetical layout, in light of deriving an optimised keyboard for users with limited typing experience.
Digital Arts
The final year projects of the students of the BFA and MFA in Digital Arts were also presented at the Expo. Areas covered were Virtual Reality, Animation, Digital Illustration, Special Effects for Film, Interactive Installation Environments, Graphic Narrative, Graphic Communication, Photography and Short Film production.