2nd April 2012

Award of Malta Internet Foundation 2011 Prize

The Foundation is pleased to announce the winner of the Malta Internet Foundation prize for 2011 is Ms Judie Attard, a BSc ICT graduate at the University of Malta who is currently studying at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland. The prize was awarded for innovative work describing or demonstrating a mobile and location-based application that profits from use of the Internet and addresses a need that is particularly relevant to the Maltese context.

Ms Attard's submission, which was her final year project, is entitled "White Cane Device" and exploits the portability and availability of mobile technology to provide a means of guidance to visually impaired people whilst they are on the move. Specifically it addresses the challenge of orientation loss — knowing exactly where you are in an unfamiliar environment. Using the phone's camera, the system automatically identifies landmarks in the vicinity of the user as well as the user's relative position to them. It achieves this by exploiting mobile internet technology to communicate with a powerful server having access to sufficient data and image-recognition software to compute the required information.

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. The Foundation was responsible for the setting up of the Malta Internet eXchange (MIX) to facilitate local IP traffic between local ISPs. Current activities also include supporting IPv6 and offering annual prizes for outstanding projects on Internet-related themes. Website: www.nic.org.mt

The Malta Internet Foundation offers an annual prize in support of academic work making a significant contribution to Internet technologies. Details of the 2012 prize are available under 'News' at https://www.nic.org.mt

2nd April 2012