Research — that would be the simplest way to answer the question above. Really and truly this answer would only apply to a small niche of individuals throughout the world.
It is a big challenge to explain to people what you do with a science university degree. The questions “Int għal tabib?” (Are you aiming to become a doctor?) or “Issa x’issir, spiżjar?” (Will you become a pharmacist?) are usually the responses. The thing is, people have trouble understanding non-vocational careers — if you are not becoming a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor or a priest, the concept of your job prospects is quite difficult to grasp for the average Joe.
In truth, it is not really 100% Joe Public’s fault — research is a tough concept to come to terms with, ask a good portion of Ph.D. students about that. There seems to be a lack of clarity in people’s minds about what goes on behind the scenes. If you boil it down, everything we use in our daily lives from mobile phones to hand warmers are the spoils of research — a laborious process with the ultimate goal of increasing our knowledge and, consequently, the utility of our surroundings.
“People need to stop feeling threatened by big words and abstract concepts they cannot grasp”
So, then, why exactly is it such an alien concept? I think the reason is that research is very slow and sometimes very abstract. Gone are the days when a simple experiment meant a novel, ground-breaking discovery — research nowadays delves into highly advanced topics, building on past knowledge to add a little bit more. I have complained about this to many of my colleagues on several occasions — and it is more complicated when you are studying something like Chemistry and Physics, or worse, Maths and Statistics — people just do not get it!
Research is exciting. The challenge is how to infect others with this enthusiasm without coming off as someone without a hint of a social life (just ask my girlfriend). It is nice to see initiatives like the RIDT and Think magazine trying hard to get the message out there that research is a continuous process with often few short-term gains. It can be surprising when you realise how much is really going on at our University, despite its size and budget.
To befriend the general public researchers still need to do more. The first step is relaying the message in the simplest terms possible — people need to stop feeling threatened by big words and abstract concepts they cannot grasp. There also needs to be increased opportunities for interaction with research — Science in the City is the perfect example. Finally, I think MCST needs to start playing a larger role — it must work closer to University and take a more coordinated role at a national level. Only then can we begin to explain what us researchers do.
Producing Food products, pharmaceuticals, and fine chemicals leads to hazardous waste and poses environmental and health risks. For over 20 years, green chemists have been attempting to transform the chemical industries by designing inherently safer and cleaner processes. Continue reading
Music has changed society. Stephanie Mifsud met ethnomusicologistDr Philip Ciantar to talk about music from all over the world. Studying diverse musical traditions has taught him about himself and how music can bridge cultural divides to bring us together
Classical, romantic, baroque, rock, hip hop… music continues to change throughout the years, yet we all look for that beat that gets us moving. How can we not when music is such an important part of our life?
Music is found everywhere: on television adverts, films, on the radio and at places of worship. Our society immerses us in it for hours every day. A person will listen to music that represents the way they feel. Music has the potential to influence moods, feelings, and thoughts.
“Music opens infinite thinking modes unknown to us and uncovers situations we wouldn’t otherwise experience”
Legendary rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, told Life magazine in 1969, ‘I can explain everything better through music. You hypnotise people to where they go right back to their natural state, and when you get people at their weakest point, you can preach into their subconscious what we want to say.’
Music, like language, has a common factor: a person’s active role. People create music. No music can exist without the people who make it.
The Ethnomusicologist Dr Philip Ciantar (University of Malta) is interested in both the music itself, as a humanly organised sound, and the musicians. His research focuses on understanding how people worldwide think about music and how that affects their music. He meets and interviews countless musicians and their audiences. People’s thinking about music is shaped by who they are, their world-view, and how they use their creative imagination to create music. Take John Lennon’s song Imagine. The song has touched countless around the world. It might have changed the way people see themselves, relate to the people around them, and influenced future songs.
Dr Philip Ciantar
Music to say ‘Hello!’
Ciantar explains that ‘by listening to and exploring music from different countries we can understand other cultural and social realities. Music opens infinite thinking modes unknown to us and uncovers situations we wouldn’t otherwise experience.’ According to him, ‘music can highlight social issues or it can make a connection with different cultures when many other avenues fail’. This is the acceptance of ‘otherness’, the concept of what makes us different from each other culturally and socially. Music can be a very effective medium.
Acceptance of different cultures needs to be taught from a young age. Music can help in showing people the advantages of multiculturalism. Ciantar suggests that, at school, children can be taught instruments used in different cultures. This would help students understand and appreciate not just the instruments but also the musicians playing them. He continues, ‘you need to be open to other opinions, cultures, and traditions’ and music provides the right scenario.
Understanding music globally should lead to appreciation of diverse sounds and how they are made, communicated, and transformed into meaning. The musical process reveals humanity and here otherness surfaces as a challenge for us to deal with. It is up to us to then connect with different cultures we might consider alien.
People come together through music. The village feast is Malta’s best example of unity through music. During a feast a quiet pjazza transforms into a music concert, a fireworks festival, and a food extravaganza — uniting the whole community. These celebrations bring people together ignoring their differences.
Multiculturalism is a worldwide phenomenon. Malta is becoming multicultural and, as Ciantar comments, ‘music is an indicator of what is going on. Performances of African music at the Marsa Open Centre can be interpreted as a plea for social acceptance and cultural integration. Slavic street players in Republic Street play Bach’s violin partitas to make us connect with them culturally. Once we are connected they play a nostalgic lullaby from their homeland to make us feel the pain of distance and sympathise with them. Undoubtedly, music serves as a social text; in itself, an intriguing sonic document that links the evident with the untold or even ignored.’ This is the power of music and the concept of otherness that can shape our thoughts on multiculturalism and readiness to accept others’ views.
“Undoubtedly, music serves as a social text; in itself, an intriguing sonic document that links the evident with the untold or even ignored”
He became even more aware of multiculturalism while conducting his Ph.D. research. He went to Libya to experience different cultural backgrounds and traditions. He worked with Libyan musicians, attending their rehearsals, talked to people on Tripoli’s streets about the musical tradition of ma’lūf (a tradition valued for its Andalusian legacy), and sneaked in percussion performances with Libyan musicians. Apart from writing a book, these experiences helped Ciantar understand otherness and the challenges it implies.
Ciantar’s first experience with ethnomusicology and otherness goes back to 1991, when he was inspired by the writings of John Blacking and Bruno Nettl, and started researching Maltese folk music għana. He saw how the għanejja performed in two different contexts and their music changed accordingly. The music they sang was more elaborate in their regular bars when compared to stage music with an unknown audience.
Otherness can also be scrutinised through musical translation. Ciantar researches musical translation: how we digest and eventually accept music that might not be initially appealing to us. Recently, he composed a Maltese festa band march out of tunes that he had recorded in Libya. The process allowed him to investigate the music and himself. He had to take elements of one musical tradition and apply it to another that was culturally remote, using himself to understand the process of how a person thinks and transforms thought into music.
Ciantar is very hopeful of the musical evolution in Malta as this is being influenced by the different cultures that people encounter everyday. This will create a more varied musical scene. Ciantar can already feel the difference.
Stephanie Mifsud is part of the Department of English Master of Arts programme.
How does the loss of memory change a person? Can media replace memory? Giulia Bugeja asks several researchers to find out the affect on cultural memory and she also touches on dementia
When Mike* went to the nursing home that evening to visit his grandmother Maria*, she was worried that he wouldn’t be able to find her because the caretakers had changed her room. Mike tried explaining to her that her room on the 4th floor had been refurbished a year ago, but she couldn’t remember.
Dr James Corby
‘Can life without memory be considered a meaningful existence?’ asks Dr Charles Scerri (Malta Dementia Society, and Department of Pathology, University of Malta). Dr Scerri researches dementia. He is currently examining which physical environments and what sort of psychosocial wellbeing can improve life in local dementia hospital wards. In fact, Dr Scerri reports that today there are over 44 million people suffering from some form of dementia. That is around 100 times the Maltese population. He asks, ‘what type of society can we end up with if we are wholly made up of individuals with no past and an uncertain future?’
With more people relying on new media technology to record information and experiences, Dr Scerri’s question faces a future society where media could replace memory. ‘It would be short-sighted to think that new media will have no long-term influence on the complex nexus of personal and cultural memory’, says Dr James Corby (Department of English, UoM).
Photography already acts as a surrogate for memory. But, it does not stop there; theorist Roland Barthes goes one step further saying how photography can capture details missed by the human eye. As developers of new media strive to enhance experiences, more users are adopting them. In the final quarter of 2012 alone, Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones. This smartphone, equipped with HD video, an in-built camera, calendar, and interactive 3D map helps people capture memories and avoid having to remember appointments or directions. It even comes with Siri, your own ‘personal assistant’, to use Apple’s words.
Despite these abilities, Dr Corby is sceptical. As a researcher working on the interfaces between literature, philosophy and culture, Dr Corby thinks that the rich tradition of the humanities should inform debates about cultural memory. ‘The idea that a facility to record memories leads to the diminishment of personal memory is by no means a new idea. Indeed, it is precisely the accusation that, in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates makes against writing.’ Writing did not steal our ability to remember and neither should new technologies.
“You can never really know if what she’s saying is true because her memories are not always real”
So what would happen if old or new media failed us? When the accounts office of the family business burned down, Mike could relate to his grandmother’s anxiety due to her lack of personal memory. All the accounting records, invoices, transaction records, and overseas payments were destroyed. The accountant was so shocked that he still will not enter his old office after 15 years.
The accountant had to keep paper records. There was too much information to remember and they couldn’t memorise it all. Although they recorded the information they still lost it in the fire.
More about Alzheimer’s in Malta
Dr Scerri has collaborated with the Department of Pathology to launch the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Group (University of Malta). Their objective is to gather several multidisciplinary professionals to ‘promote and facilitate research and scientific collaboration in Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia’. Together with Trevor Zahra, he recently released the publication X’ħin hu? Fatti dwar id-dimensja (What time is it? Facts about dementia).
We all risk losing both valuable information and the recollection of experiences. So what would happen if Malta became a nation of people without a memory of important events? For Dr Corby, a society which relies on new media and less on memory ‘might then lead to a complete eliding of any difference between personal memory and an increasingly undifferentiated surfeit of readily available cultural memory — a sort of technologised and globalised cultural eidetic memory’.
There’s also the possibility that media such as photographs could lead to the creation of cultural memories which never took place. ‘I imagine false memory to be the norm—it would be naïve to think that the visual representation of a culture […] is free from ideology’ says Dr Corby. Our national identity will instead be formed around uncertain events.
Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of American soldiers raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima signifies a moment of national pride for Americans. Few Americans are aware that the photograph shows the flag being raised for a second time. The first flag was too small but the second larger flag would be seen by incoming ships.
Similarly, on the 4th floor of a nursing home, an old woman recalls how the nurses refused to take down the Christmas decorations. In her room, there was only a lone poppy. ‘She often creates stories in her head’, says Mike. ‘You can never really know if what she’s saying is true because her memories are not always real.’
‘Memories are created by altering a set of connections between brain cells so that one cell stimulates the others,’ says Jonah Lehrer, Wired Magazine. By creating memories, we are literally rewiring our brains. Every time a memory is recalled, the connection between brain cells is restructured and the memory altered depending on the stimuli of the current situation. This means that whilst media may fail us, so might our memories.
Will a nation inevitably make the same mistakes because its people cannot remember past experiences or because they replace them with false ones? When asked how memory recall can be assisted, Dr Scerri acknowledges that media is a useful tool in improving memory, as ‘memory albums are extremely valuable for individuals with dementia in facilitating memory events and in reducing anxiety and confusion’. Perhaps these tools can help Mike’s grandmother.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the people mentioned in the article.
Giulia Bugeja is part of the Department of English Master of Arts programme.
Look out for an in-depth feature on dementia in the next issue.
There are over 100 billion galaxies in our universe. Each galaxy has billions of stars. Each star could have a planet. Planets can breathe life. Alessio Magrowrites about his experience hunting for E.T. Illustrations by Sonya Hallett
In 1982, 4 years before I was born, the world fell in love with Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Fifteen years later, the movie Contact, an adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel, hit the big screen. Although at the time I was too young to appreciate the scientific, political, and religious themes I was captivated and it fired my thoughts. I questioned whether we are alone in this vast space. What would happen if E.T. does call? Are we even listening? If so, how? And, is it all a waste of time and precious money? Instead of deflating me, these questions inspired me to start a journey that led me to my collaboration with SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. I participated in ongoing efforts to try and find intelligent civilisations on other worlds.
The debate on whether we are alone started ages ago. It was first debated in Thales, Ancient Greece. Only recently has advanced technology allowed us to try and open up communication channels with any existing advanced extraterrestrial civilisations. If we do not try we will never answer this question.
For the past fifty years we have been scanning the skies using large radio telescopes and listening for signals which cannot be generated naturally. The main assumption is that any advanced civilisation will follow a similar technological path as we did. For example, they will stumble upon radio communication as one of the first wireless technologies.
SETI searches are usually in the radio band. Large telescopes continuously scan and monitor vast patches of the sky. Radio emissions from natural sources are generally broadband, encompassing a vast stretch of the electromagnetic spectrum — waves from visible light to microwaves and X-rays — whilst virtually all human radio communication has a very narrow bandwidth, making it easy to distinguish between natural and artificial signals. Most SETI searches therefore focus on searching for narrow band signals of extraterrestrial origin.
Narrow bands are locked down by analysing a telescope’s observing band — the frequency range it can detect. This frequency range is broken down into millions or billions of narrow frequency channels. Every channel is searched at the same time. SETI searches for sharp peaks in these small channels. This requires a large amount of computational resources, such as supercomputing clusters, specialised hardware systems, or through millions of desktop computers. The infamous SETI@home screen-saver extracted computer power from desktops signed up to the programme, which started as the millennium turned.
E.T. civilisations might also transmit signals in powerful broadband pulses. This means that SETI could search for wider signal frequencies. However, they are more difficult to tease apart from natural emissions, so they require more thorough analysis. The problem is that as broadband signals — natural or otherwise — travel through interstellar space they get dispersed, resulting in higher frequencies arriving at the telescope before lower ones, even though they both were emitted at the same time. The amount of dispersion, the dispersion gradient, depends on the distance between the transmitter and receiver. The signal can only be searched after this effect is accounted for by a process called dedispersion. To detect E.T. signs, thousands of gradients have to be processed to try out all possible distances. This process is nearly identical to that used to search for pulsars, which are very dense, rapidly rotating stars emitting a highly energetic beam at its magnetic poles. Pulsars appear like lighthouses on telescopes, with a regular pulse across the entire observation band.
For the past four years I have been developing a specialised system which can perform all this processing in real-time, meaning that any interesting signals will be detected immediately. Researchers now do not need to wait for vast computers to process the data. This reduces the amount of disk space needed to store it all. It also allows observations to be made instantaneously, hence reducing the risk of losing any non-periodic, short duration signals. To tackle the large computational requirements I used Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) — typically unleashed to work on video game graphic simulations — because a single device can perform tasks of at least 10 laptops. This system can be used to study pulsars, search for big explosions across the universe, search for gravitational waves, and for stalking E.T..
The Electromagnetic Spectrum. Higher frequencies mean higher energies but shorter wavelengths. X-rays and Gamma rays are on the higher end of the spectrum making them so dangerous.
E.T. we love you
Hunting for planets orbiting other stars, known as exoplanets, has recently become a major scientific endeavour. Over 3,500 planet-candidates were found by the Kepler telescope that circles our planet, about 961 are confirmed. Finding so many planets is now leading scientists to believe that the galaxy is chock-full of them. The current estimate: 100 billion in our galaxy, with at least one planet per star. For us E.T. stalkers, this is music to our ears.
Life could be considered inevitable. However, not all planets can harbour life, or at least life as we know it. Humans need liquid water and a protective atmosphere, amongst other things. Life-supporting planets need to be approximately Earth-sized and orbit within its parent star’s habitable zone. This Goldilocks zone is not too far away from the sun, freezing the planet, or too close to it, frying it. These exoplanets are targeted by SETI searches, which perform long duration observations of exoplanets similar to Earth.
“The big question is: where do we look for E.T.? I would prefer rephrasing to: at which frequency do we listen for E.T.?”
By focusing on these planets, SETI is gambling. They are missing huge portions of the sky to focus on areas that could yield empty blanks. SETI could instead perform wide-field surveys which search large chunks of the sky for any interesting signals. Recent development in radio telescope technology allows for the instantaneous observation of the entire sky, making 24/7 SETI monitoring systems possible. Wide-field surveys lack the resolution needed to figure out where a signal would come from, so follow-up observations are required. Anyhow, a one-off signal would never be convincing.
For radio SETI searches, the big question is: where do we look for E.T.? I would prefer rephrasing to: at which frequency do we listen for E.T.? Imagine being stuck in trafficand you are searching for a good radio station without having a specific one in mind. Now imagine having trillions of channels to choose from and only one having good reception. One would probably give up, or go insane. Narrowing down the range of frequencies at which to search is one of the biggest challenges for SETI researchers.
The Universe is full of background noise from naturally occurring phenomena, much like the hiss between radio stations. Searching for artificial signals is like looking for a drop of oil in the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately, there exists a ‘window’ in the radio spectrum with a sharp noise drop, affectionately called the ‘water hole’. SETI researchers search here, reasoning that E.T. would know about this and deliberately broadcast there. Obviously, this is just guesswork and some searches use a much wider frequency range.
Two years ago we decided to perform a SETI survey. Using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (USA), the world’s largest fully steerable radio dish, we scanned the same area the Kepler telescope was observing whilst searching for exoplanets. This area was partitioned into about 90 chunks, each of which was observed for some time. In these areas, we also targeted 86 star systems with Earth-sized planets. We then processed around 3,000 DVDs worth of data to try and find signs of intelligent life. We developed the system ourselves at the University of Malta, but we came out empty handed.
A camera shy E.T.
Should we give up? Is it the right investment in energy and resources? These questions have plagued SETI from the start. Till now there is no sign of E.T., but we have made some amazing discoveries while trying to find out.
Radio waves were discovered and entered into mainstream use in the late 19th century. We would be invisible to other civilisations unless they are up to 100 light years away. Light (such as radio) travels just under 9.5 trillion kilometres per year. Signals from Earth have only travelled 100 light years, broadcasts would take 75,000 years to reach the other side of our galaxy. To compound the problem, technology advances might soon make most radio signals obsolete. Taking our own example, aliens would have a very small time window to detect earthlings. The same reasoning works the other way, E.T. might be using technologies which are too advanced for us to detect. As the author Arthur C. Clarke stated, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.
The Wow! signal is a brief, strong radio burst of unknown origin detected by the Big Ear Telescope, SETI search, 1977. If it originated from deep space, it could either be a new astrophysical phenomena or an alien signal.
At the end of the day, it is all a probability game, and it is a tough one to play. Frank Drake and Carl Sagan both tried. They came up with a number of factors that influence the chance of two civilisations communicating. One is that we live in a very old universe, over 13 billion years old, and for communication between civilisations their time windows need to overlap. Another factor is, if we try to detect other technological signatures they might also be obsolete for advanced alien life. Add to these parts, the assumed number of planets in the Universe and the probability of an intelligent species evolving. For each factor, several estimates have been calculated. New astrophysical, planetary, and biological discoveries keep fiddling with the numbers that range from pessimistic to a universe teeming with life.
The problem with a life-bloated galaxy is that we have not found it. Aliens have not contacted us, despite what conspiracy theorists say. There is a fatalistic opinion that intelligent life is destined to destroy itself, while a simpler solution could be that we are just too damned far apart. The Universe is a massive place. Some human tribes have only been discovered in the last century, and by SETI standards they have been living next door the whole time. The Earth is a grain of sand in the cosmic ocean, and we have not even fully explored it yet.
“Signals from Earth have only travelled 100 light years, broadcasts would take 75,000 years to reach the other side of our galaxy”
Still, the lack of alien chatter is troubling. Theorists have come up with countless ideas to explain the lack of evidence for intelligent alien existence. The only way to solve the problem is to keep searching with an open mind. Future radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will allow us to scan the entire sky continuously. They require advanced systems to tackle the data deluge. I am part of a team working on the SKA and I will do my best to make this array possible. We will be stalking E.T. using our most advanced cameras, and hopefully we will catch him on tape.
Wi-fi is ubiquitous. The technology can be an easy back door for hackers to access a computer through online tools that anyone can learn to use. The global cybercrime bill now tops €700bn and will keep rising. To find out the security of Maltese Wi-Fi networks Kurt Mahoney (supervised by Prof. Ing. Victor Buttigieg) mapped out around 70% of the island’s built-up areas.
Mahoney first carried out in-house testing on Wi-Fi security protocols. He then formulated security categories depending on ease and speed of access to a private network. For example, the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) security standard could be cracked in less than one minute (irrelevant of password complexity). On the other hand, the WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access II) security standard with AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) grade encryption and a twelve-character random alphanumeric password was virtually impossible to crack using brute force techniques.
Kurt Mahoney
Setting up a car with several Wi-Fi antennas, he then travelled a preplanned route through all the Maltese villages, apart from Mdina. Private security protocols were noted from automatic Wi-Fi transmissions, however he avoided conducting cracking or penetration testing. Mahoney then created a security map for the Maltese Islands from 64,317 observed private networks. Forty percent of private Wi-Fi networks in Malta were very vulnerable to hacking that increased to 90% if using more sophisticated attacks.
Wi-Fi security was poor all over the Island, with Western and South Eastern districts having marginally lower security. Malta needs a nationwide awareness campaign to increase the security levels of Wi-Fi networks. Top-notch security can be setup in a few minutes. All modern routers support military grade AES encryption standards, and together with a proper password policy one would render a Wi-Fi network almost invulnerable to direct attack.
This research was presented at the fourth Workshop in Information and Communication Technology (WICT). It was performed as part of a B.Sc. (Hons) in ICT at the Faculty of ICT and part sponsored by the Malta Communications Authority. It was shortlisted for the Chamber of Engineers’ Best ICT Student’s Project Award.
Europe has a dream: a single European sky. By unifying its air traffic it wants to clean up its skies and make them safer. To find out how Dr Sedeer El-Showk interviewed researchers at the University of Malta
Every day around 30,000 aircraft take to Europe’s skies. Choreographing this airborne dance is daunting. At the moment, it is orchestrated by the disparate air traffic management systems of each European country, with control handed over at border crossings. The aeronautics research team at the University of Malta is part of an ambitious EU project to change that by establishing a single European sky, enabling EU air traffic controllers to manage increasing amounts of traffic with greater safety, lower costs, and a reduced environmental impact.
A passion for flight
Ask Prof. Ing. David Zammit-Mangion (Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, UoM) what he loves and he will reply, ‘anything that flies’. He has come a long way since his childhood dreams of flight, when he would build model aeroplanes and scamper over fences to photograph real ones. Now he leads a major research team with an important role in Clean Sky, the EU’s €1.6 billion flagship project which aims to reduce the environmental impact of air transport.
The enthusiasm for flying never left Zammit-Mangion. As an adult, he eventually took to the skies himself, learning to fly during his doctoral research at Cranfield University in the UK, where he designed a cockpit instrument to monitor the take-off performance of aircraft. ‘My dream was to twin my passion with my profession,’ he said. It is a formula that has worked. Zammit-Mangion’s familiarity with commercial operations, safety procedures, and aircraft equipment has given his research an edge by enabling him to quickly estimate the cost and feasibility of different approaches. ‘When it comes to addressing problems, you need to have a very broad understanding of the whole industry,’ he says, and his hands-on industrial experience and hours logged in the cockpit have proven invaluable. Clean Sky is central to meeting the environmental goals embedded in the vision of a unified European sky. Launched in 2008, its goal is to reduce the excess noise and greenhouse gas emissions created by aeroplanes. Air transport is responsible for around 2% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but traffic is expected to more than double by 2030. By improving air traffic management (ATM) and aircraft technology, the 600-member Clean Sky project aims to ensure that emissions increase at a slower rate than demand.
Clearing the air
Aeroplanes currently follow flight paths through set air corridors, which can make routes unnecessarily long. They also may have to climb or descend in stages and wait in a holding pattern at their destination. These inefficient practices increase the amount of fuel used, leading to higher costs and greater greenhouse gas emissions. Each kilogram of jet fuel burned releases roughly three kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere, along with other greenhouse gases like nitrogen oxides. This happens high in the atmosphere, where these gases end up taking part in a variety of physical and chemical processes that cause them to have a greater environmental impact than they would closer to the ground. Given that many airliners burn around 50 kg of fuel per minute, even relatively small optimisations can have a significant impact.
“Each kilogram of jet fuel burned releases three kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere, along with other greenhouse gases like nitrogen oxides”
Improving air travel routes is not a simple task. It is what engineers call a ‘multi-criterion, multi-parameter problem’. In other words, you have to balance lots of factors, like the type and mass of the aeroplane, weather conditions, route limitations, and air traffic control constraints. At the same time, you need to maximise performance on different objectives such as fuel use, flight time, and environmental impact. Zammit-Mangion describes it as ‘a very complex mathematical problem’. That sort of complexity might sound like a nightmare to most people, but it is just the sort of thing Ing. Kenneth Chircop thrives on. ‘My real love is for engineering mathematics,’ said Chircop. He studied engineering for his degree, but then his passion for mathematical challenges drove him to join the aeronautics research team. ‘At the end of the day, I wanted to do something heavy in mathematics again.’ As their contribution to Clean Sky, the team developed a software package called Green Aircraft Trajectories under ATM Constraints (GATAC) to help optimise flight routes. Instead of just performing a single optimisation, GATAC provides an optimisation framework which aircraft operators can use with their own models. By plugging in models of aircraft and engine performance, emissions levels, noise production, and so on, users can work out optimal air travel trajectories to match their constraints and conditions. The core software developed at UoM incorporates various models from different research partners, but users are also free to plug in their own models. Aircraft manufacturer Airbus uses GATAC with its own proprietary models. ‘It’s great to see that foreign partners look at us as equals,’ said Chircop. ‘They trust us to develop state-of-the-art technology. We have delivered, and they trust us to keep delivering. We’re really proud of that; it’s what makes us tick and want to do more.’
Air traffic over Europe. Courtesy of Flightradar.comDr Ing. Andrew Sammut
Bringing it home
This work has brought more than just international recognition to Malta; the country will also enjoy practical benefits. Kenneth Chircop is spear-heading Clean Flight — a national research project financed by the Malta Council for Science and Technology’s national research and innovation programme 2011 — to apply the lessons from Clean Sky to Maltese airspace. ‘Our impact on the national scene can be remarkable,’ said Chircop, describing the gains to be made by optimising the arrival and departure routes aeroplanes use at Malta airport. As an island nation, Malta relies heavily on air traffic to connect it to the rest of the world. In 2013, Malta International Airport saw over 30,000 arrivals and departures, up from roughly 26,000 only seven years ago. Despite this, its air traffic systems need an overhaul; while the technology is state-of-the-art, some of the procedures are out of date. For example, aeroplanes arriving and departing from an airport follow standard, published routes, called STARs (Standard Terminal Arrival Route) and SIDs (Standard Instrument Departures) respectively, which can simplify airspace management. ‘The SIDs in Maltese airspace were designed years ago when fuel was relatively cheap, and the impact combustion made on the environment was not given due importance,’ said Chircop, ‘and we don’t even have STARs.’ Updating these procedures presented a clear opportunity to reduce fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions in Maltese airspace. Together with their partner, Maltese aeronautics consultancy company QuAero Ltd, Chircop, Zammit-Mangion, and the rest of the team analysed the flight paths taken by aircraft in Maltese airspace and discovered that they were scattered and inefficient. They developed a tool to design and analyse the best arrival and departure routes for aeroplanes, which they used to calculate revised routes for Malta’s airport. Based on fuel savings estimates for the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, the two most common aircraft in Maltese airspace, the new routes could save 465 tonnes of fuel for departing aircraft and 200 tonnes for arrivals every year. The fuel reductions mean less money spent and lower CO2 emissions in Maltese airspace. Not only does that directly benefit Malta’s environment, but it also offers indirect benefits by reducing the pressure on Malta’s carbon emission caps. In addition to improving the course followed by flights, the team has helped improve climbs and descents. Planes can approach the airport in many different ways: for example, a smooth, continuous descent, a series of steps interrupted by level flight, or a close approach at full altitude followed by a quick descent. Determining which approach is optimal is a dynamic problem that has to factor in the weight of aeroplane and its cargo, weather conditions, operational constraints, air traffic and so forth. Current optimisation methods try to balance flight time and fuel use, but do not take the other factors into account. The Clean Flight team developed a new approach using computer algorithms which can improve the efficiency of climbs and descents in around 10 minutes on a single computer. ‘So 15 minutes before departure, for example, an air traffic controller can calculate the optimal route for the flight at the current conditions,’ said Chircop. Altogether, this work could save 1,500 tonnes of fuel every year.
The sky is the limit for this aeronautics team. As Clean Sky winds to a close, the EU is preparing to launch Clean Sky 2, and the UoM team will probably continue to play a significant role in the initiative. On the national front, the optimisation system developed in the Clean Flight project will be tested with actual flight trials over the coming months – a major step forward in a field where such tests are incredibly expensive and safety is always a paramount concern. According to Chircop, it is an indication that the potential benefits are large. ‘We’re pushing to get this technology into the field so we can see it making actual gains, instead of simply on paper,” he said. Meanwhile, the GATAC software package is already being used by key industrial players, according to Zammit-Mangion. Looking forward, it clearly has a scope beyond Clean Sky, and may even come to be used by other industries like maritime shipping, which faces similar problems. The team is also working on a project to test unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) flying with commercial aircraft in an air traffic control environment. Although the UAV tech was developed in Italy, the Maltese team will test its operational aspects. If successful, the project could open the door to the integration of UAVs into the wider aviation community. The aeronautics team has put Malta on the map when it comes to aviation research, a major accomplishment for a nation with no significant track record in the field until ten years ago. ‘We’re well-established and recognised in European and global research circles,’ said Zammit-Mangion, describing the team’s success. With the network of partners they have built up and the quality of the team’s research, the future is looking up.
Why should public, private, and non-profit entities invest in research? Several reasons exist.
Firstly, research is key for our future. Research helps drive new knowledge that will improve the world. Society depends on research, across a wide range of disciplines, to strengthen our quality of life and sustain economic stability. By raising funds for University research the RIDT is surely not trying to reinvent the wheel. On the contrary, throughout Europe, the US and Asia public universities are enhancing their Government funding through various initiatives to sustain important research. Universities all across the globe appeal to public entities, private individuals and NGOs to fund research and invest in our society’s future.
Locally, we have just started scraping the surface of fundraising for research. Recently, the RIDT received a number of important donations which shall serve to continue fostering local research. In the first of its kind, we received €55,000 from local NGO ‘Action for Breast Cancer Foundation’ (ABCF), raised through the ALIVE Cycling Challenge. They are being used to launch a Ph.D. studentship in breast cancer research. The Lifecycle Foundation has also donated €70,000 towards kidney disease research. These NGOs have followed a stream of public and private entities, as well as students, who have been donating money for research for the last three years.
Secondly, don’t you want to be part of something bigger? You probably cannot find the cure for cancer yourself, but everyone can contribute to make that a possibility. As the University’s Research Trust, we do not only want to attract big corporate companies or NGOs to donate money, but we also want you — the students, the alumni, the professionals, the workers, the parents, to realise that donating for research is a noble cause. A recent Christmas campaign at the University of Malta that was spearheaded by KSU, the UoM staff and the Chaplaincy managed to raise €12,000 from students, staff, and academics on campus. A third of these funds were donated to the RIDT, which were devolved to the Department of Anatomy. They will be invested in specialised research projects focusing on specific strands of cancer, such as leukaemias, sarcomas, brain tumours, breast and colon cancer.
Research affects our day-to-day lives. Though research discoveries take time and need constant investment to benefit our society, we can come together as a Maltese community by investing in research for good causes. Ultimately, let us imagine a world where we have cured all major diseases, where we can move objects with our thoughts, and unravel the mysteries of the universe.Imagine, and let’s make it happen!
RIDT is the University’s Research Trust aimed towards fostering awareness and fundraising for high-calibre local research. We aim to achieve this by raising funds for various research projects undertaken at the University of Malta. Please visit www.ridt.eu to donate and our Facebook page on www.facebook.com/RIDTMalta for more information about our latest events and initiatives.
Made infamous by Sigmund Freud, the idea is that we spend one third of our lives dreaming about what we would like to do. Our rational brain suppresses these feelings.
On the other extreme, our brain is just as active in certain sleep stages. These neural firings express themselves in dreams. There are no deep hidden emotions behind them.
Somewhere in between lie recent studies that show that dreams are important in memory, learning and emotions. If you sleep without dreaming these qualities will suffer. For example, rat studies in 2001 showed how while dreaming they replayed solutions to mazes to commit them to their long-term memory.
Send your questions to think@um.edu.mt and we’ll find out if it’s the truth or just a fib!
In 2011 an IBM computer called Watson made the headlines after it won an American primetime television quiz called Jeopardy. Over three episodes the computer trounced two human contestants and won a million dollars.
Jeopardy taps into general world knowledge, with contestants being presented with ‘answers’ to which they have to find the right questions. For instance, one of the answers, in the category “Dialling for Dialects”, was: While Maltese borrows many words from Italian, it developed from a dialect of this Semitic language. To which Watson correctly replied with: What is Arabic?
Watson is a good example of state of the art technology that can perform intelligent data mining, sifting through huge databases of information to identify relevant nuggets. It manages to do so very efficiently by exploiting a grid architecture, which is a design that allows it to harness the power of several computer processors working in tandem.
“Maltese has been described as a language in danger of ‘digital extinction’”
This ability alone would not have been enough for it to win an American TV show watched by millions. Watson was so appealing because it used English as an American would.
Consider what it takes for a machine to understand the above query about Maltese. The TV presenter’s voice would cause the air to vibrate and hit the machine’s microphones. If Watson were human, the vibrations would jiggle the hairs inside his ear so that the brain would then chop up the component sounds and analyse them into words extremely rapidly. The problem for a computer is that there is more to language than just sounds and words. A human listener would need to do much more. For example, to figure out that ‘it’ in the question probably refers to ‘Maltese’ (rather than, say, ‘Italian’, which is possible though unlikely in this context). They would also need to figure out that ‘borrow’ is being used differently than when one says borrowing one’s sister’s car. After all, Maltese did not borrow words from Italian on a short-term basis. Clearly the correct interpretation of ‘borrow’ depends on the listener having identified the intended meaning of ‘Maltese’, namely, that it is a language. Watson was equipped with Automatic Speech Recognition technology to do exactly that.
To understand language any listener needs to go beyond mere sound. There are meanings and structures throughout all language levels. A human listener needs to go through them all before saying that they understood the message.
Watson was not just good at understanding; he was pretty good at speaking too. His answers were formulated in a crisp male voice that sounded quite natural, an excellent example of Text-to-Speech synthesis technology. In a fully-fledged human or machine communicating system, going from text to speech requires formulating the text of the message. The process could be thought of as the reverse of understanding, involving much the same levels of linguistic processing.
Machine: say ‘hello’ to Human
The above processes are all classified as Human Language Technology, which can be found in many devices. Human Language Technology can be found everywhere from Siri or Google Now in smart phones to a word processing program that can spell, check grammar, or translate.
Human-machine interaction relies on language to become seamless. The challenge for companies and universities is that, unlike artificial languages (such as those used to program computers or those developed by mathematicians), human languages are riddled with ambiguity. Many words and sentences have multiple meanings and the intended sense often depends on context and on our knowledge of the world. A second problem is that we do not all speak the same language.
Breaking through Maltese
Maltese has been described as a language in danger of ‘digital extinction’. This was the conclusion of a report by META-NET, a European consortium of research centres focusing on language technology. The main problem is a lack of Human Language Technology — resources like word processing programs that can correctly recognise Maltese.
Designing an intelligent computer system with a language ability is far easier in some languages than it is in others. English was the main language in which most of these technologies were developed. Since researchers can combine these ready-made software components instead of developing them themselves, it allows them to focus on larger challenges, such as winning a million dollars on a TV program. In the case of smaller languages, like Maltese, the basic building blocks are still being assembled.
Perhaps the most fundamental building block for any language system is linguistic data in a form that can be processed automatically by a machine. In Human Language Technology, the first step is usually to acquire a corpus, a large repository of text or speech, in the form of books, articles, recordings, or anything else that happens to be available in the correct form. Such repositories are exploited using machine-learning techniques, to help systems grasp how the language is typically used. To return to the Jeopardy example, there are now programs that can resolve pronouns such as ‘it’ to identify their antecedents, the element to which they refer. The program should identify that ‘it’ refers to Maltese.
For the Maltese language, researchers have developed a large text/speech repository, electronic lexicons (language’s inventory of its basic units of meaning), and related tools to analyse the language (available for free). Automatic tools exist to annotate this text with basic grammatical and structural information. These tools require a lot of manual work however, once in place, they allow for the development of sophisticated programs. The rest of this article will analyse some of the on-going research using these basic building blocks.
From Legalese to Pets
Many professions benefit from automating tasks using computers. Lawyers and notaries are the next professionals that might benefit from an ongoing project at the University of Malta. These experts draft contracts on a daily basis. For them, machine support is still largely limited to word processing, spell checking, and email services, with no support for a deeper analysis of the contracts they write and the identification of their potential legal consequences, partly through their interaction with other laws.
Contracts suffer from the same challenges when developing Human Language Technology resources. A saving grace is that they are written in ‘legalese’ that lessens some problems. Technology has advanced enough to allow the development of tools that analyse a text to enable extraction of information about the basic elements of contracts, leaving the professional free to analyse the deeper meaning of these contracts.
Deeper analysis is another big challenge in contract analysis. It is not restricted to just identifying the core ‘meaning’ or message, but needs to account the underlying reasoning behind legal norms. Such reasoning is different from traditional logic, since it talks about how things should be as opposed to how they are. Formal logical reasoning has a long history, but researchers are still trying to identify how one can think precisely about norms which affect definitions. Misunderstood definitions can land a person in jail.
Consider the following problem. What if a country legislates that: ‘Every year, every person must hand in Form A on 1st January, and Form B on 2nd January, unless stopped by officials.’ Exactly at midnight between the 1st and 2nd of January the police arrest John for not having handed in Form A. He is kept under arrest until the following day, when his case is heard in court. The prosecuting lawyer argues that John should be found guilty because, by not handing in Form A on 1st January he has violated the law. The defendant’s lawyer argues that, since John was under arrest throughout the 2nd of January he was being stopped by officials from handing in Form B, absolving him of part of his legal obligation. Hence, he is innocent. Who is right? If we were to analyse the text of the law logically, which version should be adopted? The logical reasoning behind legal documents can be complicated, which is precisely why tools are needed to support lawyers and notaries who draft such texts.
Figuring out legal documents might seem very different to what Watson was coping with. But there is an important link: both involve understanding natural language (normal every day language) for something, be it computer, robot, or software, to do something specific. Analysing contracts is different because the knowledge required involves reasoning. So we are trying to wed recent advances in Human Language Technology with advances in formal logical reasoning.
Illustration by Sonya Hallett
Contract drafting can be supported in many ways, from a simple cross-referencing facility, enabling an author to identify links between a contract and existing laws, to identifying conflicts within the legal text. Since contracts are written in a natural language, linguistic analysis is vital to properly analyse a text. For example in a rent contract when making a clause about keeping dogs there would need to be a cross-reference to legislation about pet ownership.
We (the authors) are developing tools that integrate with word processors to help lawyers or notaries draft contracts. Results are presented as recommendations rather than automated changes, keeping the lawyer or notary in control.
Robots ’R’ Us
So far we have only discussed how language is analysed and produced. Of course, humans are not simply language-producing engines; a large amount of human communication involves body language. We use gestures to enhance communication — for example, to point to things or mime actions as we speak — and facial expressions to show emotions. Watson may be very clever indeed, but is still a disembodied voice. Imagine taking it home to meet the parents.
“Robby the Robot from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, refused to obey a human’s orders”
Robotics is forging strong links with Human Language Technology. Robots can provide bodies for disembodied sounds allowing them to communicate in a more human-like manner.
Robots have captured the public imagination since the beginning of science fiction. For example, Robby the Robot from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, refused to obey a human’s orders, a key plot element. He disobeyed because they conflicted with ‘the three laws of robotics’, as laid down by Isaac Asimov in 1942. These imaginary robots look somewhat human-shaped and are not only anthropomorphic, but they think and even make value judgements.
Actual robots tend to be more mundane. Industry uses them to cut costs and improve reliability. For example, the Unimate Puma, which was designed in 1963, is a robotic arm used by General Motors to assemble cars.
The Unimate Puma 200
The Puma became popular because of its programmable memory, which allowed quick and cheap reconfiguration to handle different tasks. But the basic design was inflexible to unanticipated changes inevitably ending in failure. Current research is closing the gap between Robby and Puma.
Opinions may be divided on the exact nature of robots, but three main qualities define a robot: one, a physical body; two, capable of complex, autonomous actions; and three, able to communicate. Very roughly, advances in robotics push along these three highly intertwined axes.
At the UoM we are working on research that pushes forward all three, though it might take some time before we construct a Robby 2. We are developing languages for communicating with robots that are natural for humans to use, but are not as complex as natural languages like Maltese. Naturalness is a hard notion to pin down. But we can judge that one thing is more or less natural than another. For example, the language of logic is highly unnatural, while using a restricted form of Maltese would be more natural. It could be restricted in its vocabulary and grammar to make it easier for a robot to handle.
Take the language of a Lego EV3 Mindstorms robot and imagine a three-instruction program. The first would be to start its motors, the second to wait until light intensity drops to a specific amount, the third to stop. The reference to light intensity is not a natural way to communicate information to a robot. When we talk to people we are not expected to understand how the way we put our spoken words relates to their hardware. The program is telling the robot to: move forward until you reach a black line. Unlike the literal translation, this more natural version employs concepts at a much higher level and hence is accessible to anybody with a grasp of English.
The first step is to develop programs that translate commands spoken by people into underlying machine instructions understood by robots. These commands will typically describe complex physical actions that are carried out in physical space. Robots need to be equipped with the linguistic abilities necessary to understand these commands, so that we can tell a robot something like ‘when you reach the door near the table go through it’.
To develop a robot that can understand this command a team with a diverse skillset is needed. Language, translation, the robot’s design and movement, ability to move and AI (Artificial Intelligence) all need to work together. The robot must turn language into action. It must know that it needs to go through the door, not through the table, and that it should first perceive the door and then move through it. A problem arises if the door is closed so the robot must know what a door is used for, how to open and close it, and what the consequences are. For this it needs reasoning ability and the necessary physical coordination. Opening a door might seem simple, but it involves complex hand movements and just the right grip. Robots need to achieve complex behaviours and movements to operate in the real world.
The point is that a robot that can understand these commands is very different to the Puma. To build it we must first solve the problem of understanding the part of natural language dealing with spatially located tasks. In so doing the robot becomes a little bit more human.
A longer-term aim is to engage the robot in two-way conversation and have it report on its observations — as Princess Leia did with RT-D2 in Star Wars, if RT-D2 could speak.
Lego Mindstorms EV3 brick
Language for the World
Human Language Technologies are already changing the world. From automated announcements at airports, to smartphones that can speak back to us, to automatic translation on demand. Human Language Technologies help humans interact with machines and with each other. But the revolution has only just begun. We are beginning to see programs that link language with reasoning, and as robots become mentally and physically more adept the need to talk with them as partners will become ever more urgent. There are still a lot of hurdles to overcome.
To make the right advances, language experts will need to work with engineers and ICT experts. Then having won another million bucks on a TV show, a future Watson will get up, shake the host’s hand, and maybe give a cheeky wink to the camera.
Research — that would be the simplest way to answer the question above. Really and truly this answer would only apply to a small niche of individuals throughout the world.
Take the language of a 