Academic, Researcher, Data Specialist
Currently MCAST is hosting its annual EXPO event, showcasing students projects and talents from all 3 colleges (Foundation, Technical and University). Really proud of my two dissertation students Luke Benjamin Cassar and Charleston Attard. Following is the schedule:
In late 2011 I had purchased a 15″ MacBook pro and in mid 2016 the GPU started failing until it was unusable. Apple had a replacement program of the logic board and GPU and had it replaced. Yet these started failing recently (less than 2 years after replacement). The symptoms are random restarts, green lines on display, distorted screen. This time there is no program that will replace it free of charge, and was not willing to spend anymore on this laptop. There are a number of solutions and this blog documents the one that worked for me, mostly from this article.
At this point, the MBP will always use the integrated graphics card, yet the dedicated/discrete graphics card would still be drawing power. You can take this a step further by removing 1 resistor and the card would have no power. I did not do this mod but here is the article. It is possible that the steps need to be repeated upon an OS upgrade/reinstall. I am hoping to be able to use this laptop for a few more years like this. The compromise is that now I cannot use the external display, other than that I am unaffected (not a gamer) since an integrated graphic card can cope with my development requirements.
Apple stopped supporting this laptop and could not update the OS anymore. Installed Ubuntu yet the graphics card kept causing issues. Removed the transistor and worked perfectly. So currently the dedicated graphics card is not being powered and the integrated card is being utilised.
PingFin 9 was a resounding success across all European workshops. This year, which also marks the 10th Anniversary of SEPA, we experimented with a different layout here in Malta which worked really well. The workshop required each team to design, implement and visualize part of the SEPA payment protocol then to consolidate all parts together.
I would like to thank our sponsors MITA, MITA Innovation Hub, eSkills Malta Foundation, RS2 and Central Bank of Malta for their support. Thanks go also to MCAST management and administrative staff for their support. A special thanks to my colleagues Alan Gatt, Luke Vella Critien and Robert Abela. Thanks to all the staff at Odisee namely Dr. Christophe Debruyne. My final thanks and congrats go to all students for their hard work, dedication, and professionalism.
More information is found on our facebook page.
Glad to announce that all is set for the PingFIN 9 workshop. This is an international e-payments workshop being organised from Monday 12th-Thursday 15th March concurrently in 5 Universities Colchester Institute, Faculty of Organization and Informatics, FH Salzburg, Odisee, Westerdals, and obviously MCAST. The workshop in Malta shall be held at the MITA Innovation Hub, SmartCity and it will be attended by 16 local and 12 foreign students.
This activity is being sponsored by MITA, MITA Innovation Hub, eSkills Malta Foundation and RS2 Software plc. Assisting me are my colleagues Alan Gatt, Luke Vella Critien and Robert Abela. Visit our facebook page for more information.
During the international conference ISMS 2018, hosted at the University of Malta, Darren Cilia has presented our research work in typing biometrics on behalf of MCAST IICT. As part of our research, the smartphone application used to gather the data and the dataset itself is being made public on Kaggle and GitHub respectively.
We hope that other researchers will find these contributions useful and look forward to hearing of other new research.
The ship that ran aground at Qawra point, Hephaestus, has made for a very spectacular and rare sighting. Here is my quick shot at it. Just hope that any leaks are stopped and the area cleaned as quickly as possible.
After the announcement that our research will be accepted for the ISMS2018, MCAST IICT organized a meeting where the IICT directors thanked and congratulated Darren Cilia for his hard work and achievement.
Darren graduated in December 2017 and will be presenting our research next week at the International Conference on Information Systems and Management Systems 2018 at the University of Malta in Valletta. Today, he delivered a talk to all 1st, 2nd and 3rd year BSc Software and Multimedia students, sharing his experience and motivating them to excel and believe in themselves.
Thanks also go to our directors for their support. I would like to congratulate Darren and say how proud I am of his achievement, hard work, and professionalism.
MCAST IICT to have research published at a conference for first time. This will be done on the 22nd-23rd February at ISMS 2018
A new chapter in my life, I am co-founding ensquad together with Robert Abela, Alan Gatt and Luke Vella Critien. As an IT startup, we specialise in the handling of digital data to offer business insight, restructure/clean for migration to new systems or data warehouses and offer tailor-made training.
It was my pleasure to represent MCAST IICT, together with the institute directors, Mr Conrad Vassallo & Mr Mark Anthony Farrugia, and some students at the Digital Assembly 2017. The conference was held on the 15th and 16th June 2017 at the Mediterranean Conference Centre in Valletta. The conference was packed with technical, business and informative seminars about Cyber Security, Data Economy, Roaming and other current digital topics of importance within the EU.
We were one of the various exhibitors, together with University of Malta, Gaming Malta, Malta Enterprise, eSkills Foundation, Malta Communications Authority and MITA Innovation Hub just to name a few. Am really proud of my 2nd Year B.Sc. students who after a year-long hard work, found the time to exhibit their end of year project.
You made us all proud.
