When systems stop working in the interest and favour of all, staying quiet can feel impossible. Across Malta, many young people are beginning to step forward because something inside them refuses to remain silent when faced with injustice. THINK meets with two young activists to learn why, despite everything, they choose to keep going.
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When sound becomes sight, music finds a new language. Maltese composer and producer André Tabone has turned this idea into reality with an AI-driven project that lets algorithms ‘imagine’ what music might look like. His work, developed during his studies in Berlin, blurs the line between performance, engineering, and visual art – transforming every note into motion.
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Lara Sammut is finding answers to a long-standing challenge in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department at Mater Dei Hospital. Threatened miscarriage is a poorly understood condition that can lead to pregnancy loss, yet there is little data in Malta to help guide treatments and reassure families. Sammut’s research promises to change that.
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As part of their coursework, a group of Media and Knowledge Sciences students following a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Digital Arts were tasked with the challenge of rebranding CampusFM, the University of Malta’s official radio station. THINK speaks with Olga Sater, one of the students who worked on the rebranding project, about their journey.
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Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that affects reality perception, but studies suggest that individuals with it tend to have superior creative skills. Art therapy is used to address negative aspects of the disorder and may help diagnose it. Art can serve as an outlet to express what cannot be described in words, and its content can vary significantly between those with the disorder and healthy individuals.
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Have you ever felt stressed about your future when hearing about environmental issues and climate change in the news? Have you ever felt particularly anxious about the future of humanity and our planet? Well I can assure you, you are not alone.
There is a formal term for this phenomenon: eco-anxiety. The American Psychology Association describes eco-anxiety as ’the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations.’ While this is not yet considered as a psychological illness, it can have numerous mental consequences in some people.
Eco-anxiety does not affect everyone in the same manner. Various studies in the last few years have shown that eco-anxiety tends to impact younger generations the most, mainly children and youths. Surveys show that many young people rank climate change as the most significant societal problem. In one recent study published in The Lancet Planetary Health and conducted in 10 different countries among 16 to 25-year-olds, 59% of respondents stated that they are very or extremely worried, while 84% of participants said that they felt at least moderately worried.
Moreover, the majority of respondents ‘felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty,’ about climate change. Eco-anxiety also tends to be more prevalent among people who are aware of the environment and knowledgeable on climate change. This group feels largely responsible for solving this problem that has been dumped onto its shoulders by governmental inaction and earlier generations.
This might also explain why it is quite common for young students studying in the environmental field to feel the symptoms of eco-anxiety. As a student currently following a sustainability-related course, I am aware that it can get quite overwhelming. In fact, as part of a recent Sustainability Week on university campus, a workshop was organised to help students cope with the symptoms of eco-anxiety. While coping mechanisms vary from one individual to another, these are some things you can try out if you find yourself in a similar situation:
The European Union’s success relies on positive relationships—cooperation and good will is key. The EU’s Development and Cooperation Policy exists to support these connections. Its focus is on external relations, establishing partnerships with developing countries and channelling billions of euros to them every year. The European Commission plays a crucial role in this regard, managing and implementing directives on behalf of the EU. But what do we really know about the effectiveness of EU aid in helping citizens in developing countries? And how far is female empowerment part of this agenda?
In short—we don’t know much!
Research in this area is scarce, and this is what prompted me to tackle this question myself, under the supervision of Dr Stefano Moncada. My specific focus was on assessing whether the EU is committed to gender equality and female empowerment, taking Afghanistan as a case study. I reviewed all the available aid programming documents from the last financial period, and assessed whether the EU was effectively supporting Afghanistan to achieve the fifth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of gender equality. I adopted a mixed-method approach, using content analysis and descriptive statistics. Basically, this meant coming up with a very long list of keywords related to gender, and checking how many times these words appeared in the policy documents. Whoever invented the ‘ctrl + F’ function saved my academic life!
The results of my research were pretty surprising. I found that the EU is now focusing much more on gender empowerment on the ground in Afghanistan than it did a few years ago.
According to my data, and when comparing this to previous studies, it appears that the EU’s commitment to supporting this goal is growing over time. However, I also found that there is substantial room for improvement, as the attention given to such issues is rather conservative, and not equally balanced across all the SDG targets. For example, the need to increase women’s employment is mentioned many more times than the need to support female education or political participation. This is surprising as education is key to many other improvements in wellbeing. Nevertheless, I believe the overall results are encouraging and important, not only to highlight improvements in the effectiveness of the EU’s development and cooperation policy, but also in reply to a growing sentiment that puts into question the EU’s capacity to manage, and lead, in key policy areas. We can only hope that this continues exponentially.
This research was carried out as part of a Bachelor of European Studies (Honours) at the Institute for European Studies, University of Malta. The dissertation received the ‘2018 Best Dissertation Award’.
Everybody wants peace of mind. From the moment we lock the front door before going to work, to the second the car’s ignition turns off when we get back. Insurance makes that possible.
Insurance is one of the largest sectors of the Maltese financial services industry and a major pillar of its economy. Despite this importance, there is a research gap. Most historical records I referenced when looking into the history of insurance in Malta hinge on maritime history and historical accounts of bustling ports and the activity surrounding them.
My research aim was to initiate the first project actively chronicling the key contributors and events in Malta’s insurance industry. I started with methods used by the earliest inhabitants of the island, tracing its roots in maritime trade, followed by the emergence of more complex and sophisticated insurance services and products.
Reference to insurance in Malta can be traced back as early as 750 BCE, the time of the Phoenicians. The earliest known insurance contract I found was dated to 1524, around 12 years before the oldest contracts known prior to this study. Intra and extra-territorial socio-political, economic, and regulatory events have strongly contributed to the development of insurance and have forged it into the industry it is today.
Through a series of semi-structured interviews, backed up by findings from empirical literature and archival research, I made some key discoveries. For example, after the Knights of St. John settled in Malta, Maltese farmers fearing a Turkish invasion sought security (insurance) from their landlords through contracts. I also found that in the 1980s, a very specific insurance existed for racing horses. These valuable insights are being published by Emerald publishing (London).
Understanding the past’s lessons is the best way to prepare for the future.
This research was carried out as part of an M.A. in Insurance and Risk Management, Department of Insurance, Faculty of Economics, Management and Accountancy, University of Malta.
Author: Mark Lawrence Zammit
Virtual Reality (VR) has created a whole new realm of experiences. By placing people into varied situations and environments, VR enables them not only to explore, but to challenge themselves and gain skills in ways never thought possible. With applications in medical and psychological treatment, VR is now being used to train surgeons, treat PTSD, and to help people understand what it’s like to be on the autism spectrum. The key to this application is VR’s ability to immerse its users.
Many agree that immersion needs two key ingredients: a sense of presence and interaction with the environment. Interaction comes in three main forms. Selection is about differentiating between items in the environment. Navigation allows travelling from one point to another and observing the environment. Finally, manipulation lets users grab, move and rotate selectable items. In addition to this, VR applications need a setting. Supervised by Dr Vanessa Camilleri and Prof. Alexiei Dingli, I chose to use escape rooms (adventure games where multiple puzzles are solved to leave a room) to experiment with these interaction techniques.
I used escape rooms because they’re highly interactive and naturally immersive systems. And since interaction isn’t a one-size-fits-all scenario, I also applied procedural content generation (PCG) techniques to create the escape rooms themselves.
People selected items using a reticle, a small circle in the middle of the screen which expands or contracts to indicate which objects they could interact with. They navigated the space by looking around through the VR headset and moving their joystick. They manipulated puzzles from a separate screen which I layered on top of the escape room. This allowed them to inspect objects to their heart’s content, while also reducing the amount of clutter in the room.
Since there was no previous work in PCG escape rooms, I had to pave my own way. I used a genetic algorithm, a machine learning algorithm that mimics evolution in biology to select the best solution to a problem, to determine which puzzles and items would be placed in the escape room. I also programmed the game to create the rest of the room, placing floors, ceilings, and everything else that the algorithm didn’t consider. This made the space look like it had been made by an actual person, despite being created through AI.
From the results gathered, most people found that the system allowed them to explore the VR environment in a very natural way. Players said that the room’s generated interaction was consistent, reliable, and fun.
Understanding immersion is critical for VR’s future applications. If we can help people hone these techniques by creating a few games along the way—so be it!
This research was carried out as part of a Bachelor of Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of ICT, University of Malta
Author: Natalia Mallia