Category: IT

PingFIN 9 @ Malta

Posted on by Frankie

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.

MCAST IICT Presents & Publishes Research

Posted on by Frankie

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.

Well done Darren Cilia

Posted on by Frankie

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.

 

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ensquad

Posted on by Frankie

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.

 

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MCAST @ Digital Assembly 2017

Posted on by Frankie

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.

  • Charleston Attard (Image Enhancement for Colour-Vision Impaired Individuals),
  • Alistair Azzopardi (Arab Spring Themed 3D FPS),
  • James Azzopardi (Facial Recognition for Persons with Prosopagnosia),
  • Christian Bonnici (User Authentication via KeyStroke Dynamics),
  • Jean Paul Caruana (Drone Construction & Drone Racing Simulator),
  • Luke Benjamin Cassar (Augmented Reality Restaurant),
  • Nathaniel Cutajar (Map Generation via Procedural Content Generation),
  • Evgeny Danilenko (Image-Sound Bi-Directional Converter),
  • Isaac Hili (Syria Civil War Automated News Scraper and Linker),
  • Martin John Meli (Digital Mosaicer),
  • Mark Patrick Owen (Flight Price Scraper and Monitor) and
  • Simon Zerafa (Augmented Reality Interior Design).

You made us all proud.

 

PingFin 8 @ Malta – Closure & Thanks

Posted on by Frankie

It has been my pleasure and honour to chair the PingFin 8 workshop at Malta. I am pleased to inform you that we have ended the PingFin 8 workshop at Malta with great success. It has been a formidable 4-day experience and a real pleasure to share with a lot of talented people. I believe that all participants have learnt a lot and enjoyed themselves, we have also managed to complete design and implementation of 2 clearing house and 2 bank teams, had we had some more time, the other teams would have also finished.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank a number of persons who were an integral part of this workshop, starting with Odisee University for having us as their partner and for coordinating this event at an international level. Thank you, Yvan Rooseleer and Stefaan Debrabandere for your invaluable time and support. This year, we have had a number of guests to deliver the professional side of SEPA, namely Mr Joseph Mallia and Mr Emerson Amaira from Central Bank of Malta, Mr David Grech and Mr Aaran Calafato from MITA.

This year, MITA has increased its support at different levels, thanks to: Mr Carm Cachia and Ms Bernardette Zerafa from eSkills Malta Foundation for their financial support; thanks to Mr Alexander Borg, Ms Deborah Maria Schiavone and Ms Tea Vrcic from MITA Innovation Hub for the venue, refreshments, laptops, service and support.

This is a testament that MCAST puts the student experience at the forefront and I would like to thank: the Principal & CEO, Mr Stephen Cachia, IICT Director Mr Conrad Vassallo and IICT Deputies Mr Mark Anthony Farrugia and Mr Jean Paul Tabone; IICT admin team Ms Stefania Aquilina, Ms Cher Tonna, Ms Nadia Schembri and Ms Sephora Said. I would like to thank my colleagues from my heart for their invaluable support, I would not have been able to do this without their help: Mr Alan Gatt, Mr Luke Vella Critien and Mr Robert Abela.

We are really glad to have hosted this event and hope that MCAST represented the Maltese culture and personality with our foreign visitors. It has been a real pleasure having you: Alpay Topalka, Ayoub Houari, Azeddine El Hammouchi, Berton Lutina Mulamba, Mohamed Lammou, Redouan Belguenani, Said Hadj, Walid Haouriqui and Yassine Azouagh.

My last, but not least, thanks go to the local students who have shown great dedication and respect to the visiting students, the hosts, the guests and staff. You have made MCAST proud and made a very positive name for yourself. Well done and thank you: Alistair Azzopardi, Andre Grech, Damian Fenech, Dylan Fenech, Francesca Micallef, Geordey Gatt, Jamie Lee Dingli Sacco, Jean-Paul Caruana, Kurt Montanaro, Luke Benjamin Cassar, Martin Meli, Michael Vella, Sigmond Gatt and Zack Gatt.

M.Sc. Research

Posted on by Frankie

In October 2013 I started my M.Sc. in Business Intelligence Systems and Data Mining studies at De Montfort University, and have graduated in July 2016. In this post, I would like to document my final research project: Continuous Passive User Authentication via Typing Heat Maps, part of which has been presented at the ICCE-Berlin 2016 Conference and published as an IEEE Paper.

My research was in Continuous Passive User Authentication via Typing Heat Maps, under the mentorship of Dr. Samad Ahmadi. The aim of this research was to identify whether it is possible to classify the owner of a smartphone via their typing pattern using keystroke dynamics (time interval digraphs) and touch data (position, surface area, slide distance and slide velocity) whilst typing normal text. The rationale for this research was that smartphones are the most commonly used personal devices loaded with personal, corporate and billing data. Yet, sharing practices are very common amongst family members, colleagues and friends which could lead to undesired situations such as children conceding to in-app purchases.

So first I set out to identify a set of terms that a user can type. I came across the work of the late Adam Kilgariff who created a lemmatized list based off from the British National Corpus. This process is documented in this video.

Next, I created a custom mobile keyboard and app which was used to gather a number of keystrokes from 32 different users. This led to the generation of around 32K digraph events. A walkthrough of the mobile app is found in this video. This app was used on two identify smartphones, Samsung S5, and given to 32 different individuals in supervised sessions such as what is documented in the following 3 videos: part 01, part 02, part 03.

DiGraph

The data was then migrated to a PC, cleaned and migrated to a DB. Some exploratory analysis was done then a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network was trained for the classification. The research yielded an accuracy of 96% and a False Alarm Rate of 6% which compares very well with other research. For more detail, you can check my VIVA presentation in this video.

 

PingFin8

Posted on by Frankie

Glad to announce that MCAST shall be hosting the PingFin 8 workshop at Malta from 13-16th March 2017 at the MITA Innovation Hub, Smart City, Kalkara. This will be an e-Payments International Workshop where participants will implement a solution in Oracle PL/SQL to handle SEPA payments.

We would like to thank the organising university Odisee University, Brussels, for having the pleasure to have us as their partner for the third year running and for sending their students to us.

Thanks also go to our sponsors e-Skills Malta Foundation and MITA Innovation Hub.

PingFin 7 Links:

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