In cities, pollution remains a pressing environmental concern for pedestrians. THINK sits down with Prof. Ing. Daniel Micallef and Dr Edward Duca from UM, who are using plants and physical barriers to combat traffic-generated pollution.
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How much do you know about the history of THINK? If you’re a THINK superfan, then you know that the first edition wasn’t called THINK. Read on to learn more about how THINK evolved over the last decade.
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Do you ever recall those moments in nature, where tiny insects seem to mistake you for a tree? Not only do they walk vertically upwards with incredible grip, but as they are brushed off and fall to the ground, they just nonchalantly walk away. No big deal. Except, when put into perspective, an ant falling from your arm is as though a person fell off a rooftop and walked away untouched. Why do small insects, and ants specifically, never seem to take any fall damage?
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What do you do when you are feeling unwell? Probably go see the doctor. What if you wanted to charm the girl you like? You might try asking her out. However, for Maltese people in the eighteenth century, their answer might be sorcery!
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Elderly people in residential care homes have been particularly affected by the pandemic and the safety measures associated with it. Isolation, loneliness, and the lack of physical touch are a few factors that have impacted their mental well-being.
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Patients are currently monitored using wired leads (electrocardiographic cables). This decreases patient mobility and comfort. Studies have shown that it can also lead (pun not intended) to long-term skin damage, especially with newborns. A team of researchers from the University of Malta (UM) are examining whether some of this data can be extracted through digital cameras, removing the need for cables. What if hospitals could use ordinary digital cameras to monitor patients’ vital signs?
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Do you feel safe walking around after dark? Does the size of the city affect how you feel? How do these feelings compare between men and women? For data analysts, these questions come with unwieldy amounts of data. Luckily, Dr Gianmarco Alberti from UM’s Department of Criminology (Faculty of Social Wellbeing) has authored free software that visually portrays data patterns in a practical way.
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By 2017, AI had advanced far enough for AlphaGo, a specialised AI that can play the highly complex board game Go, to beat the major Go players in the world and be awarded professional 9-dan by the Chinese Weiqi Association. Go, however, is a fully deterministic game like Chess, with no random elements. Probabilistic games like Pandemic, on the other hand, are even trickier for AI to play efficiently, as the randomness of dice rolls or shuffled cards makes it much harder for computers to crack them. This problem inspired me (Konstantinos Sfikas) to attempt to create an AI that can play the Pandemic board game.
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The term ‘seamless,’ adopted from fabric or surface production, refers to non-visible gaps or spaces between materials. In education, ‘seamless’ is quite analogous, as it refers to smoothed transitions in a student’s educational voyage. But are these seams strong enough?
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Better recovery for patients, reduced need for revision surgeries, and many hundreds of thousands of euros saved for public health and industry. That could be the outcome of four years’ intense work by engineers and medical professionals at the University of Malta and Mater Dei Hospital in developing biodegradable metal-based tailor-made bone scaffolds. Cassi Camilleri writes.
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