Picture a Maltese crowdfunding website dedicated specifically to locally based creatives. It would be supported and promoted by government entities to the Maltese public, based locally and abroad. For this to work the public sector plays a crucial role in promoting the site and educating the public on how crowdfunding works.
The site creates a platform for followers of local creatives to contribute towards performances and products made by artists they love. Unlike sites like Kickstarter, products that can be digitally distributed or ordered will remain on the site doubling as a digital distribution platform for locally made works.
How do you help school children handle fights, bullying, and other conflict properly? You build a game, of course, and you let children take on different roles in a village. But how does that lead to resolving conflicts? Ashley Davis met researchers Prof.Rilla Khaled and Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis to find out more
Do you chuckle at the thought of a serious game? The phrase is an oxymoron. How can a game be serious? Games are meant to be fun, frivolous, a way to pass the time. Or else you sometimes hear that games are anything but frivolous. That video game violence in particular is a threat to social order. The idea that games can be used to advance human understanding about the world, and that they can help us to teach, train, or motivate people in some way, is something that still needs to enter our mentality.
Designing games to explore research questions and to solve real world problems is actually a very important aspect of games research, an area of applied research that now has a strong presence at the University of Malta with the establishment of the Institute of Digital Games. Researchers from the Institute work on European-funded projects to create games that tackle serious problems affecting children and adults alike.
Village Voices has been voted the best learning game in Europe at the 2013 Serious Game Awards
Prof. Rilla Khaled and Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis are two researchers now based at the Institute of Digital Games who work on serious game projects. Khaled’s work focuses on serious game design, while Yannakakis is a specialist in artificial intelligence and computational creativity. Computational creativity tries to build upon the latest technological innovations in human–computer interaction that enable computers to act intelligently to some aspects of human beings. These two areas, game design and game technology, represent a large part of the teaching and research strengths of the Institute.
One game that Khaled and Yannakakis recently helped develop is Village Voices which has been voted the best learning game in Europe at the 2013 Serious Game Awards. It was developed as part of the SIREN project, an FP7-funded interdisciplinary consortium made up of researchers from Malta, Greece, Denmark, Portugal, the UK and the US, along with Serious Games Interactive, a Danish Games Studio.
Let’s take a look at what makes a serious game and think about what made the project a success and what didn’t work so well.
The serious side of Village Voices aims to help school children learn conflict resolution skills. Players take on the role of one of four interdependent villages that are situated in a farm setting and given various quests to complete. Sitting side-by-side at separate computers, they may collaborate, share resources and help each other, or they may spread rumours and steal from each other. Much like any playground setting, children can play nicely, or they can be bullies.
The purpose of the SIREN project was to apply the latest advancements in game technology to the creation of serious games. The brief focused on innovations in procedural content generation, an area of artificial intelligence that automatically builds game elements like game levels or quest structures that would otherwise need to be designed manually. Another part of this innovative technology is detecting the emotions of players. Physiological responses can be measure through various tech like Electroencephalographic (EEG) sensors that can be used to detect a person’s emotional state directly by reading their brain’s electrical signals. Virtual agents were another technology that interested the research team. These agents are believable non-player characters that interact with the player with perceived intelligence.
The idea was to then create a game that would adapt to player behaviour, using emotion recognition tools to create an individual experience for each player. The decision to focus the game on teaching children about conflict resolution came later. Rather than to create a game about bullying behaviour, which is what a lot of people think of when they picture conflict between children, the research team wanted to explore the kinds of everyday conflicts that take place in school-yards. Friendship disputes, differences in opinion, and arguments over the possession of classroom items might seem trivial to adults, but they are important problems for children for whom school is their entire world. The SIREN consortium envisioned a game where players could experience and resolve conflicts in a dynamic setting.
Some people who make serious games say that the serious application of the game should take precedence over fun. They say that serious games should offer players a safe environment to try out new behaviours. Khaled disagreed with this approach to game design. ‘Serious game experiences need to feel real and not trivial. Otherwise why would we then use them to raise a mirror to reality?’
Village Voices allows actions that teachers might find surprising. Players can be destructive in that world. They can steal from each other. The game gives aggressive players a noose with which to hang themselves. Knowing that the person whose labours you just destroyed, or who stole the items you were collecting, is sitting right there next to you intensifies the game’s emotional experience. Exchanges can become heated between players. It is these kinds of heated exchanges that often makes games fun.
Some of the characters children can play in Village Voices
Games are usually poor at provoking emotional responses. Village Voices does exactly that. Khaled told me about one session in a British classroom (the game was tested across Europe). A female student had such an upsetting experience that she cried. After reflecting on the incident with her teacher, the researcher, and the other players, the girl later returned to play again. Khaled thought this was a breakthrough learning moment for the student.
So VillageVoices is a good learning tool, and it is also fun to play. But how successful was the team in applying game technologies like procedural content generation and emotion detection to its design? Khaled said that the experience of designing a game primarily for the purpose of testing technological innovations was the hardest part of the project. You might think that the role of a game designer is to work out the best solution to a problem given the technologies at hand. However, when the application of technology is the problem, the relationship between design and technology is more complex. Khaled said that the need to include particular game technologies in the design of Village Voices created a situation much like a rock band that needs to accommodate a peripheral member, such as a violin player. ‘While the violin player is not core to the project, the whole project needs to be compromised in some way in order to show off the violin player’s skills. It is not clear that the violinist is going to help the band make a new hit song, but it is clear he has to be there. So the band tries to find the violin player’s most positive qualities because he has got to be there.’
In Village Voices, the violin player’s best qualities are adaptive technologies that make the player experience more personalised. Because support for emotion detection plug-ins was never actually included in the final prototype, the game instead asks players directly how they feel about events in the game and introduces variations to the player experience according to their responses.
So far we have seen that Village Voices was successful according to the popular opinion of game-design peers at the European Serious Games — it won an award. We have also seen anecdotally that it is a provocative, if not fun game, based on the British student’s emotional response. But what does the SIREN team think about the game?
You cannot sit a child down in front of a computer and hope that they will magically learn something
According to Khaled, it can be difficult to implement learning games in classroom settings, and even more difficult to properly evaluate them. Project funding usually runs dry after around three years, and games take most of that time to develop. Gaining access to schools is also difficult. The game is a good fit for classes like social studies that are often held only once or twice a week. Together with the problem of semester breaks and short evaluation periods, as well as the tendency for teachers to have access to only a few computers often equipped with obsolete hardware, researchers would rarely see students engage with Village Voices over a long period of time. All these things place limitations on the design, testing, and evaluation of games for research purposes.
Rigorous evaluation is important as, ultimately, learning games are not black box tools. You cannot sit a child down in front of a computer and hope that they will magically learn something. That vital learning moment comes when players discuss their in-game experiences. As Khaled explained, ‘Playing the game is just half the experience. The other half is the subsequent discussion of the game experience.’
Given that discussion is so essential to the evaluation process, and that it is so difficult to get a sample of those discussions in a research setting, I asked Khaled if it was possible to turn the discussion into a game as well, to include it as part of the package. Khaled mentioned the meta-game, the part of the game where a player is both playing and watching themselves play the game. It is in the meta-game that players achieve the highest level of reflection. It works well as a kind of after-game discussion, a debriefing for players as they leave behind the conflicts of the game world and return to the everyday life of the school-yard; but Khaled added that of course it could be turned into a game. Achieving this level of reflection in the game package itself is just another challenge for the designers of serious games.
The Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta offers world-class postgraduate education and research in game studies, design, and technology. The inter-disciplinary team includes researchers from literature and media studies, design, computer science and human-computer interaction. Visit game.edu.mt or contact Ashley Davis (ashley.davis@um.edu.mt) for information about the Institute’s Master of Science (taught or by research) and Ph.D. programmes. This article forms part of The Gaming Issue.
Malta has around 220 beekeepers over just 316 km2. The country’s name is tied to honey that has been prized for its flavour and health benefits. Local researchers are finding out just how unique it is and some of its powerful properties.Continue reading
I chose to study Chemistry and Physics simply because they were the subjects I enjoyed most, so I enrolled on a B.Sc. (Hons) degree at the University of Malta without having a clear idea about what I would be doing once the four years are over. I was not the best brain in the class but in 2004 I graduated with a 2:1 grade and it was quite obvious that I needed a plan. A couple of opportunities to embark on a Ph.D. in Britain came along through local contacts and applications on jobs websites. Despite not knowing much about the subject, I decided to go with the Ph.D. at Exeter University because it was about Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, a subject that sits right on the verge of Chemistry and Physics.
Obviously the idea of moving abroad, living away from my parents and starting this amazing new adventure was incredibly exciting. From the start of my Ph.D. things went incredibly well, it was immediately obvious that I was much better at doing research than studying for exams. I started with looking into dynamics in solid materials on the microsecond timescale, which is the less studied type of motion. It bridges the gap between very fast (spin-lattice relaxation motions, nanosecond) and slow (millisecond to second) timescales. I published my first scientific paper a year into my Ph.D., and five more followed by the time I defended my thesis.
Because of the contacts I built during my Ph.D. as soon as I finished I was offered a post at University College London, Institute of Child Health, working as a research fellow in renal imaging. I carry out research at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital using novel non-invasive Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques. I work mainly with children requiring a kidney transplant. The aim of my work is to eventually be able to furnish doctors with information about their patients, which is currently either unavailable to them or they can only get through invasive clinical techniques such as biopsies. My work here has produced six peer-reviewed papers and I am currently working on a few more.
The research I carried out during my Ph.D. involved dealing with basic scientific concepts like Quantum Mechanics — that studies sub-atomic phenomena — and I was at liberty to experiment as I saw fit, which I enjoyed. However, despite being much more restrictive, I find clinical research extremely rewarding. Coming face to face with the people benefiting from all your hard work is really priceless.
Just after my Ph.D. I married my husband. We are now very proud parents of a two-year-old son. Any working mum would tell you that raising a family while maintaining a career is not easy, but I believe that if you like your job enough, combing the two is very worthwhile. Obviously research does not wait for anyone, and luckily for me, having colleagues that supported me meant that I was able to carry on publishing while I was on maternity leave.
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.
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.
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.
