Alexiei Dingli

University of Malta

The Digital Transformation of the Real World entails the need to move from analogue to digital to virtual in an attempt to recreate that reality into a digital twin that is enhanced through multi-domain, multi-disciplinary integration systems. The What factor in the W6H model (What, Why, Who, Where, When, How and Why Not) takes central stage in thi...

Games have the potential to be a powerful educational tool. By their very nature, games are designed to engage players and motivate them to achieve specific goals. When applied to teaching, learning and assessment, game design can be utilised to create engaging and effective learning experiences that can be, in turn, used to assess a variety of ski...

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are cryptographic assets that are unique, meaning that each individual token is different from any other. For example, NFTs can represent an original digital artwork or serve as a digital reference to it. In both cases providing digital references to the original work is achieved through a distributed ledger, which is usu...

Throughout the years, technology has been increasingly adopted in assessment practices to support the process of data gathering, analysis, and interpretation. However, the application of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), to digital assessment goes beyond the mere administration of data and has the potential to enhance the...

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTa) can either represent an original digital artwork, or act as a digital reference to the actual work. In both as digital references to the actual work. In both cases the record in the distributed ledger, mostly a blockchain-based database, intends to serve as a proof of ownership or transfer of rights. NFTs might also add a...

Despite evidence that digital tools have the potential to foster student learning and self-regulation, digital educational practices continue to suffer a lack in the level of personalization and adaptivity. On the other hand, emerging technologies and techniques, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and gamification, are constantly informing educat...

Digital identities of collaborative robots/robots and human-robot/robot-human interactions are critical components in building systems. These digital agents (AI-powered software or robots/bots) are entrusted with tasks on behalf of specific individuals/companies using these identities. In this review paper, the authors synthetize several approaches...

For a long time, the primary approach to control pain in patients involved the use of specially designed drugs. While these drugs have proved to be sufficient to reduce the perception of pain in patients of all ages, they do not come without any potential side effects. The prolonged use of such drugs can have adverse effects on the health of a pati...

Mental health students, who are still undergoing training, might find it challenging to visualise and fully understand what their patients experience. For this reason, the authors created a virtual reality simulator which mimics the symptoms of a person suffering from schizophrenia at a virtual workplace. The simulation is managed by an artificial...

The education system is subject to an ongoing digital transformation. The administrative departments should be able to handle grading, admissions, enrolments and recognition of certificates securely and quickly. Course managers should not only have faith in e-learning but also in e-assessment. And finally, learners should be able to access course m...

In recent years, a clear trend towards personalised learning experiences has emerged. Individual preferences are in the foreground and should be made possible, for example, through selectable choices. If these courses take place in the same educational institution, the handling of credit and the clear allocation to learning outcomes is usually poss...

Games and gamification can potentially inform and transform learning by providing meaningful and engaging learning environments. The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and systems in education is envisaged as an opportunity to provide students with adaptive and personalized learning, especially in the context of mobile learning...

Digital technologies have changed and continue to shape the way students interact with learning material, both in traditional and informal education. Adaptive learning methodologies offer an interesting avenue for personalized learning, whereas every individual student is presented with tailormade content, specifically based on the distinct strengt...

With the recent advancements and results obtained by Deep Learning, several corporations are eager to begin adapting AI into their workflow to benefit from these systems, especially with the emergence of Industry 4.0. However, decision makers find themselves unable to fully trust AI systems from evaluation metrics alone and require some more transp...

The forgery and fraudulent behaviour associated with examination results and academic certificates at the different stages from storing, publishing, transfer to verification, remain a major cybercrime issue within the educational sector. In this paper, the authors discuss the technological dimension underpinning such issues and propose a system con...

The introduction of Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT) in the manufacturing industryManufacturing industry has widely contributed to improving the underlying processes. It will usher the doors towards the implementation of newer emerging technologies such as Smart Manufacturing and Digital Twin technologies (DT). This chapter highlights aspe...

With the recent boosted enthusiasm in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Financial Technology (FinTech), applications such as credit scoring have gained substantial academic interest. However, despite the evergrowing achievements, the biggest obstacle in most AI systems is their lack of interpretability. This deficiency of transparency limits their a...

Recent years have seen digital game mediums taking conventional amusement, entertainment, and leisure industries by storm. They have revolutionized the system to the extent that the industry cannot now even dream of doing without this overwhelming reality. The same game mediums that have capitalized on intrinsic leisure aspects have simultaneously...

With the ever-growing achievements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the recent boosted enthusiasm in Financial Technology (FinTech), applications such as credit scoring have gained substantial academic interest. Credit scoring helps financial experts make better decisions regarding whether or not to accept a loan application, such that loans wit...

With the ever-growing achievements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the recent boosted enthusiasm in Financial Technology (FinTech), applications such as credit scoring have gained substantial academic interest. Credit scoring helps financial experts make better decisions regarding whether or not to accept a loan application, such that loans wit...

In the educational sector even the most sophisticated digital environments will not make human interaction obsolete, as learning and education are inherently social processes. This also means that any application that involves learning and assessment must deal with problems resulting from human error. Some of these problems can effectively be count...

Analysing Handwritten Documents is a challenging task. This particular area cannot always come up with general solutions, given that most handwritten manuscripts contain unique characteristics that describe how the document was written, which include different handwritings. These challenges in transcribing different handwriting styles are due to va...

Serious games continue to attract the interest of developers and users. This project aims to design a serious game called Win the City to explore famous attractions e.g. buildings in the city of Valletta in Malta. The Adobe PhoneGap, Google Maps API, and Firebase platform for Android were used to design the prototype for the game. The game uses the...

Vehicle detection is an important area in Transport and Artificial Intelligence. Through vehicle detection techniques, vehicles can be located across different images. Some of these models are robust enough to identify parts of vehicles in images where the vehicle might be partially occluded. Recent advances in detection methods gave rise to a rang...

With the proliferation of technology, science became a medium used to create and interpret heritage in a way that redefines human achievements. The recent advances in technology are providing us with a variety of tools aimed at exploring, experiencing and interacting with heritage in a completely new way, which was unimaginable up until a few decad...

Analysing video data requires the use of different models trained to retrieve or process data for a particular task. In this paper, we introduce an approach to represent the visual context within a video as queryable information. Through the use of computer vision techniques, we can detect and classify objects. Our system processes these classifica...

Detecting human abnormal activities is the process of observing rare events that deviate from normality. In this study, an automated camera-based system that is able to detect irregular human behaviour is proposed. PoseNet and OpenPose, which are pre-trained pose estimation models are used to detect the person in the frame and extract the body keyp...

The Artificial Intelligence Assisted Learning application has been created to help Mathematics students at primary school level and assist their teachers. The application generates classwork and homework worksheets based on each student’s ability level, corrects the worksheet, and gives immediate feedback to both the student and teacher. A crucial...

Feel Autism VR is a new virtual reality (VR) system which builds upon an Autism VR system which was developed in the past year. The aim of the original system was to design a novel VR environment to boost user’s awareness about autism and in so doing, increase the level of empathy towards autistic children. We sought to create a VR environment whic...

This paper describes a project that was carried out at the University of Malta, merging the digital arts and information technologies. The project, ‘Living Autism’, uses virtual reality (VR) technologies to describe daily classroom events as seen from the eyes of a child diagnosed with autism. The immersive experience is proposed as part of the pro...

This paper details the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) components of an Intelligent Digital Twin (IDT) system for a semiconductor manufacturing company using gamming visual effects, 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) and sound effects. The designed digital twin (DT) system will allow users to detect any irregularities (such as equipment failures and d...

This project focuses around incorporating multiple elements of gamification (Kapp Few Ideas 13, 2014 [1]) within the capital city of Malta. Often, tourists, or even natives, find it tough to become knowledgeable about a city’s history. However, through the implementation of games, anything could be learned much more easily! By using transmitters (G...

This chapter illustrates the use of VR applications in professional development and introduces an application used to assist teachers, learning support assistants (LSAs), and teaching assistants (TAs) to better understand autistic children's behaviors while in the classroom. One of the challenges faced in classrooms is how to understand the autisti...

In this study, a unique dataset of a scanned seventeenth-century manuscript is presented which up to now has never been read or analysed. The aim of this research is to be able to transcribe this dataset into machine readable text. The approach used in this study is able to convert the document image without any prior knowledge of the text. In fact...

This study exploits the selfie phenomenon in order to develop an application that motivates city exploration and tourism to encourage greater mobility. The application uses a reward based system that rewards the user at specific target locations by allowing the user to take pictures and selfies at these landmarks only. This in turn encourages the...

2016 is the year when virtual and augmented reality takes a boost. We've already seen various Virtual reality (VR) headsets being released and Microsoft new Hololens is finally being realised thus paving the way for Augmented Realities (AR). In this chapter, we will explore further the use of VR in two particular domains in which governments are fa...

This paper is intended as a follow up to a previous study of ours - Financial Time Series Forecasting - A Machine Learning Approach. The aforementioned study evaluates traditional machine learning techniques for the task of financial time series forecasting. In this paper, we attempt to make use of the same base dataset, with the difference of maki...

A top priority in any business is a constant need to increase revenue and profitability. One of the causes for a decrease in profits is when current customers stop transacting. When a customer leaves or churns from a business, the opportunity for potential sales or cross selling is lost. If a customer leaves the business without any form of advice,...

Game designers have to deal with the complex task of monitoring the emotional state of players in games. There are different elements with the game, which effect the player’s emotional status. Since the game play experience occurs almost unconsciously, traditional methods such as think aloud may disrupt the playing experience, thus skewing the resu...

Pivot IV: Social Wellbeing Chapter 18: Risk Assessment: Supporting Public Policy in an Uncertain World (Pg. 381) This Study provides an innovative comprehensive approach to the development of disaster risk assessments as strategic planning tools for communities and countries. It outlines the procedure and main steps, to identify and manage the ri...

2016 is the year when virtual and augmented reality takes a boost. We've already seen various Virtual reality (VR) headsets being released and Microsoft new Hololens is finally being realised thus paving the way for Augmented Realities (AR). In this chapter, we will explore further the use of VR in two particular domains in which governments are fa...

Holographic Technology has made huge strides over the past few years. The range of applications is practically endless and we envisage seeing major investments in the coming years. The main aim of this project was to create virtual 3D agents capable of behaving in a believable manner and display them within a real 3D model of a megalithic temple ca...

Over the last few years, holographic technology has been made readily available. This modern technology may have various applications ranging from medical, cultural, educational and communication industries. Focusing on the three latter industries, the main aim of this project is to create virtual agents to behave in a believable manner and display...

Europe faces a considerable challenge in providing good quality health care in the forthcoming future as the aging population increases. The phenomenon also results in a considerable cost on society due to the dependency on the public health sector particularly because such individuals would not be able to contribute to the economy. On the other ha...

This paper highlights the concepts behind the Valletta Travel Information Service (VaTIS) Project, an intelligent information system capable of harvesting data from a road pricing system using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology and low cost sensors installed throughout the city of Valletta, Malta. In this paper, we describe the di...

In our society, there is a substantial number of visually impaired individuals. However many social mechanisms are not designed with these people in mind thus making the development of electronic assistive tools essential in order to perform basic day-to-day activities. Due to the penetration of capabilities of mobile devices, such devices have bec...

The Selfie project was not only inspired by the long history of the self-portrait, but also intended to create a genealogy between the self-portraits of masters from the Modern art era and the selfie. The project, designed as a walkthrough experience, consisted of three major engagement areas. On entering the space, children were directed into a ‘t...

Monitoring the emotional state of players in games can get quite complex, taking into consideration that the game context affects the player and that a game may contain various emotional features. Furthermore, since the experience of playing a game occurs unconsciously, methods such as think aloud may interrupt the playing experience. Other methods...

In January 2014, the Government of Malta launched the ‘One Tablet per Child’ pilot project whose aim is to foresee the introduction of computer tablets in primary schools. An expression of interest was also published in order to test different types of hardware and software solutions with the aim of collecting feedback from educators and students....

A challenge identified in the current education system is that students, irrelevant of their reading capabilities, are required to follow the same literature. This paper presents a system designed to address such a challenge. The Adaptive eBook has the capability of switching the text to a simpler version, as soon as the built-in reading problem de...

The first generation of Digital Natives (DNs) is now growing up. However, these digital natives were rather late starters since; their exposure to computers started when they could master the mouse and the penetration of computers in educational institutions was still very low. Today, a new breed of digital natives is emerging. This new breed inclu...

Emerging technologies and their applications are moulding the way in which digital natives are developing. Technology is affecting people’s lives. However, we also know that it is strongly affecting the way organisations function and develop. Digital natives will soon be the employees joining companies and soon afterwards, driving them. We also und...

With more children being exposed to technology, it is only natural to understand that this will also lead towards the creation of a new type of user group. The development of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has always been effected by the struggle between the physiological and the psychological abilities of the users. This can be further expanded...

[47] claims that education is there to guarantee that all students, irrespective of their background can benefit from the learning experience to the full. This is achieved by ensuring an active participation in the community. To do so, when considering our fast changing world, educators must move away from old methodologies and experiment with new...

There exist various definitions of Digital Governance. Some claim that it is a synonym for e-government, internet government, online government or connected government. [3] defines it as being the use of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) in order to deliver government services to their citizens. [129] focuses on the fact that e-government s...

We are increasingly realising that the exposure of children and young people to technology is strongly affecting the way in which society develops. Individuals, who do not find the complexity of the digital era and constant updates in the field of technology problematic, are generally referred to as ‘Digital Natives (DNs). This notion was introduce...

From time to time, the world come across realities that simply cannot be ignored. These realities are sometimes conflicting with the current philosophy when these occur, thus facing reluctant acceptance. The change in the way of thinking is known as a paradigm shift. This term was coined by the science philosopher Thomas Khun. Kuhn states that scie...

According to [135], this term was first officially used in 1984 by the American Association of House of builders when they created a special interest group called ‘Smart House’, whose aim was to push forward the inclusion of the necessary technology into the design of new homes. This was a natural progression considering the massive advancements in...

Predicting the future is something we all do as part of our daily life. In fact, we do not really live in the present, because as soon as you think about it, it is already in the past. Thus, most of our thoughts abound around future events. However, correct predictions are not easy. First of all we need past experiences through which we can extract...

Europe faces a considerable challenge in providing good quality health care in the forthcoming future as the aging population increases. The phenomenon also results in a considerable cost on society due to the dependency on the public health sector particularly because such individuals would not be able to contribute to the economy. On the other ha...

Owing to growing population health needs, the proportion of medical staff to patients keeps diminishing; yet, the quality in healthcare services is likely to increase. Through the amalgamation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Semantic Web technologies, PINATA seeks to deal with this issue. To perk up the quality of healthcare services, PINATA util...

Today motion recognition has become more popular in areas like health care. In real-time environments, the amount of information and data required to compute the user's motion is substantial, while the time to collect and process this information are crucial parameters in the performance of a motion recognition system. The nature of the data determ...

In this paper, the author investigates the use of the popular Social Networking Site (SNS) Facebook to solve crimes. In particular, the author uses car thefts as a case study. When a car owner discovers that his or her vehicle has been stolen, every means helps to recover the vehicle. Reporting the incident immediately to the police is obligatory,...

With the major advances of the Internet throughout the past couple of years, websites have come to play a central role in the modern marketing business program. However, simply owning a website is not enough for a business to prosper on the Web. Indeed, it is the level of usability of a website that determines if a user stays or abandons it for ano...

Generic conversational agents often use hard-coded stimulus-response data to generate responses, for which little to no effort is attributed to effectively understand and comprehend the input. The limitation of these types of systems is obvious: the general and linguistic knowledge of the system is limited to what the developer of the system explic...

One of the main limitations in existent domain-independent conversational agents is that the general and linguistic knowledge of these agents is limited to what the agents' developers explicitly defined. Therefore, a system which analyses user input at a deeper level of abstraction which backs its knowledge with common sense information will essent...

One of the challenges when predicting human behavior is the variation of the same behavior in relation to the culture of the individual in question. This paper demonstrates a technique that can be employed in order to predict certain individual cultural attributes based on a regression model that considers age, gender and nationality. The technique...

The success of social networking sites has led people to require the use of multiple accounts on different platforms which effectively increases the risks in managing them. Following and finding information about friends and family has become an issue too. Guided by these observations and by careful research of existing adaptive web technologies, t...

If the documents on the WWW were somehow structured then machines can be made to extract meaning (or semantics) from the content and help us find more data that is relevant to what we search. There is an effort to find better ways to include machine-meaning in the documents already present on the WWW by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techn...

In this paper we analyse the theoretical under-pinnings underlying collaboration in virtual environments and propose a 3D Virtual World (VW) approach to the construction and facilitation of communities of practice within the context of social innovation. Although connected networks can emerge from 'flat' 2D Social Networks, while face-to-face meeti...

In this work, the authors present methods that add value to the current Web by connecting administrators of a space such as a city with its visitors. The mobile device has nowadays become an important tool in the hands of visitors of cities and the authors present it as a gateway for the administrators to their visitors. The authors present a metho...

Owing to growing population health needs, the proportion of medical staff to patients keeps diminishing; yet, the quality in healthcare services is likely to increase. Through the amalgamation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Semantic Web technologies, PINATA seeks to deal with this issue. To perk up the quality of healthcare services, PINATA util...

The acquisition of any goal happens only with the correct dose of motivation instilled in the individual pursuing it. Mobile technology is at the same time providing us with different sensors and technology which allow us to measure valuable attributes around a person who is engaged in a learning experience. In this paper we will be studying what m...

The ratio of nurses and doctors to patients keeps diminishing due to increasing population health needs, however it is expected that the quality in healthcare services increases. By merging Ambient Intelligence (Ami) and semantic web technologies, PINATA aspires to address this issue. PINATA utilises pervasive devices to aid doctors and nurses to f...

This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to:(1)The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase.(2)The conversion of the input to RDF for...

Providing patient-centric health care services is the goal of health-care institutions. However, due to human-related aspects, this goal is frequently undermined. PINATA offers an automated patient-centric system based upon Pervasive Ambience Intelligence techniques and enriched with Semantic Web technologies. The system makes use of RFID sensors t...

A paradox has been observed whereby web site usability is proven to be an essential element in a web site, yet at the same time there exist an abundance of web pages with poor usability. This discrepancy is the result of limitations that are currently preventing web developers in the commercial sector from producing usable web sites. In this paper...

The various approaches described so far are effective for controlled tasks such as annotating a collection of patient records. In reality, very few of these techniques really scale effectively to produce an ongoing stream of annotations. However, every controlled task is problematic. We live in a dynamic world where things constantly change and pro...

This document has shown how vital the whole annotation process is for the web. Unfortunately, even with the various techniques mentioned throughout the text, the annotation task is far from being trivial since it is still tedious, error prone and difficult when performed by humans. If we also consider the fact that the number of web pages on the in...

In the late 18th century, the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780) was highly impressed with a chess-playing machine known as the Mechanical Turk [194]. This machine was created by Wofgang von Kempelen and it possessed a mechanism capable of playing a game of chess against a human opponent. In reality, this was nothing more than an elaborat...

The combination of different media elements (primarily text and pictures) on the same document has been around for various centuries. The idea of combining various media elements together first appeared in [43] when Bush explained his idea of the Memex. Eventually with the development of computers, most documents were text based and very few progra...

The task of annotating content has been around for quite a while and this is clearly evident from Chapter 1. Throughout the years, various tools were created which allowed users to annotate documents manually. This chapter, will survey the various tools available, will divulge into their uses, their potential but also their limitations. Then it wil...

Annotation is generally referred to as being the process of adding notes to a text or diagram giving explanation or comment. At least, this is the standard definition found in the Oxford Dictionary [75]. As a definition, it is correct but think a little bit about today’s world. A world where the distinction between the virtual and the real world is...

Even though semi-automatic annotation is a huge step forward from manual annotation, it is still based on human centred annotation. Although the methodology relieves some of the annotation burdens from the user, the process is still difficult, time consuming and expensive. Apart from this, considering that the web is such a huge domain, convincing...