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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The University of Malta (UM) has set out to become a sustainability ‘Living Laboratory’. Jonathan Firbank speaks with Prof. Maria Attard about the Committee for Sustainability at the University of Malta, C-SUM, and its role in this interdisciplinary, interdepartmental experiment.
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Of all energy resources, solar energy is the most abundant. Harnessed even in cloudy weather, the rate of solar energy that arrives on Earth is 10,000 times greater than the rate at which humankind consumes energy. Solar technologies can deliver heat, cooling, natural lighting, electricity, and fuels for a host of applications.
But how does this technology work? Can the University of Malta (UM) lead the way towards greener energy?
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ChatGPT has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. It is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and built on the GPT-3 language model. What sets it apart from other AI chatbots is the sheer amount of data it has been trained on, allowing the quality of its responses to cause waves, leading to headlines such as ChatGPT passing key professional exams. It has also consequently caused concern in academia that it may be used to cheat at exams and assignments. We speak to two academics from the University of Malta, Dr Claudia Borg and Dr Konstantinos Makantasis, to see how academia should adapt. Are such advances a threat to be curbed or an opportunity to be exploited?
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In Malta, around 10% of the local population is affected by diabetes. This is especially alarming considering that diabetes can affect the blood and nervous system and eventually even lead to foot amputations. Researchers from the University of Malta (UM) and Mater Dei Hospital are trying to address this problem in their project Sit_Diab: Smart Insole Technology for the Diabetic Foot. They developed a novel method of detecting foot complications early enough to take action in time to help save limbs.
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THINK talks with director and writer Sarah Zammit on her short film Darb’oħra, and its journey from script to screen
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THINK takes a trip to explore research and archaeological work taking place at Borġ in-Nadur, overseen by Heritage Malta, which will see the Neolithic site freed from modern-day debris and accumulated material to show the original prehistoric structure in all its glory.
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As 35 University of Malta students prepared to showcase their dissertation projects in an exhibition at Junior College, restrictions to stop the spread of COVID-19 turned their plans upside down overnight. Yet the exhibition, titled Ctrl Z, is still taking place, having moved to where people are – online.
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How often do your date’s eyes glance down at your chest? Which products do people notice in a supermarket? How long does it take you to read a billboard?
Eye trackers are helping researchers around the world answer questions like these. From analysing user experience to developing a new generation of video games, this technology offers a novel way of interacting with machines. People with disabilities, for example, can use them to control computers. A team at the Department of Systems and Control Engineering (University of Malta) is using a research-grade eye-gaze tracker, worth around €40,000, to test technologies they are planning to commercialise soon.
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They’re called ‘skates’. Yes, like the shoes. Like sting rays, but less popular.
If I had a penny for every time I uttered those words throughout my dissertation years, I’d be a rich woman. You’d think that skates, a regular at the daily fish market, would be part of people’s general fish-knowledge. But it came to me as no surprise, considering how culinarily, environmentally, and economically unappreciated they are.
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