24th February 2011

Award of Malta Internet Foundation 2010 Prize

The Malta Internet Foundation recently awarded the 2010 prize in favour of academic work making a significant contribution to Internet technologies.

This year, the theme for the prize was work promoting universal access to intelligent, socially-oriented web services that made use of the Internet and which addressed a need particularly relevant to the Maltese context. Two prizes were awarded: one in the category final year project and one in assessed coursework.

The final year project prize was awarded to Mr. Matthew Sammut for his project entitled “Location-Based Advertising”, which was submitted under the BSc. ICT (Hons) degree at the University of Malta. The work was carried out under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Montebello of the Department of Intelligent Computer Systems, Faculty of ICT. The system gives a user the means to know the whereabouts of services which are geographically close to the user’s current location and which are relevant to current needs. Service providers register their services, whilst users register their requirements and preferences. The system puts the two together, using location-aware technologies.

The assessed coursework work prize went to Messrs. Simon Theuma, Andrew Said, and Julian Zammit for a group project entitled “PoolMe - the Green Sustainable Carpooling System”. This was carried out as an applied practical task by the three students concerned who are all in the second year of their studies leading to the BSc. ICT (Hons) degree at the University of Malta . The work was supervised by Dr. John Abela of the Department of Computer Information Systems, also in the Faculty of ICT. The system uses a range of internet and communication services to facilitate the pooling of cars to carry out journeys between specified locations and times amongst a group of users.

The prizes were awarded at a special session organized within the programme of the MCA Annual Conference which was held on 28^th January. During the session the Foundation also announced the theme for the 2012 prize.

About the Malta Internet Foundation

The Malta Internet Foundation, also known as NIC(Malta), was officially inaugurated in January 1999 and is responsible for managing the .mt top-level domain for Malta. The mission of the Malta Internet Foundation also includes activities to promote use of the Internet in Malta. Website: www.nic.org.mt

24th February 2011