LearnML Partners
UM
The University of Malta (UM) is the highest University in Malta. There are some 10,000 students including over 750 foreign/exchange students from nearly 80 different countries, following full-time or part-time degree and diploma courses, many of them run on the modular or credit system. UoM has been involved as coordinator and partner in numerous EU-funded projects under various Programmes including FP5, FP6 (37 projects) FP7 (49 projects), H2020 (8 projects), Lifelong Learning Programme, Culture 2000, Tempus, Research and innovation projects (24 projects in the last 2 years) and various other international and regional programmes and initiatives. The UoM team is represented by both the Institute of Digital Games (IDG) and the Dept of Artificial Intelligence (DAI) covering both LearnML aspects of serious game design and game AI development (IDG) but also game-based teacher and student learning and game evaluation in Malta and in the associated countries of Greece and Norway (DAI).
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The Institute of Digital Games, was established in 2013 and houses a multidisciplinary research group with backgrounds from Computer Science (specifically AI and HCI), Interaction Design, the Arts, and the Humanities. The group performs basic and applied research, approaching games from a variety of perspectives, many of which focus on interaction design, serious and persuasive game design, AI, user (cognitive and affective) modelling, procedural content generation and player experience. The Institute has already participated in several national and international research projects. IDG has been or currently involved in the Com n Play, Envisage and CrossCult H2020 projects, the FORETELL and the Go Go Gozo Erasmus+ projects and the following FP7 ICT projects: C2Learn (Creative Emotional Reasoning Computational Tools Fostering Co-Creativity in Learning Processes), SIREN (Social games for conflIct REsolution based on natural iNteraction), and iLearnRW (Integrated Intelligent Learning Environment for Reading and Writing).
IDG currently coordinates or has coordinated the Erasmus+ e-Crisis project, the FP7 Marie Curie CIG projects AutoGameDesign (Autonomous Computational Game Designers) and REFLECT (Reflective Game Design) and has also been a partner at the FP7 MEDIA project EUCROMA (The European Cross Media Academy). Members of the Institute of Digital Games are involved in the IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games Society, are members of the editorial boards of the most prestigious journals in the areas of games research and AI (e.g. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games), and have been in core organisational positions of the most respected conferences in game research (e.g. FDG, IEEE CIG, IEEE COG). IDG has won several international awards for both academic publications and games designed (e.g. Villages Voices, Words Matter, and Iconoscope). Researchers of the Department of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of ICT have a long standing experience on game-based learning methods for teacher empowerment and student education. The Department of Artificial Intelligence, from the UM team, has been involved in the GBL4ESL Erasmus+ project which concerned a game-based learning approach for early school leavers in Malta and beyond.
The coordinator of LearnML (UM) is a world-class academic institution in serious games design, game development, game-based learning and game artificial intelligence. In particular, the IDG group has designed award winning games for EU funded projects such as that of Villages Voices for the FP7 ICT SIREN project that received the European Serious Games Award 2013. Among several other game projects the group has also designed and developed the game Words Matter (funded by the FP7 ICT iLearnRW) that targets and assists dyslexia in young children which is nowadays incorporated within the one-tablet-per-child program of the Maltese Ministry of Education and Employment. UM has a long-standing record of designing serious games for education and evaluating them within primary and secondary school settings. Most importantly for LearnML, IDG hosts world-leading researchers at the intersection of artificial intelligence and games and a top rated MSc in Digital Games: the MSc is ranked 21st game design program globally by Princenton Review in 2018.
UM has three core roles in LearnML:
i) project coordination and management;
ii) game design, development and authoring tools implementation;
iii) game-based teacher empowerment and wide in-class evaluations in Malta.
Further, UM leads O2 and participates in all other intellectual outputs of the project given its breath of expertise with respect to the aims of LearnML: AI, serious games, game-based learning.
Key Personnel
Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis
Dr Antonios Liapis
Dr Vanessa Camilleri
Dr Iro Voulgari
NTUA
Founded in 1837, almost along with the modern Greek state, NTUA is the oldest Technical University in Greece. Study is structured according to the continental European system for training engineers, with an emphasis on solid background. The duration of courses leading, after the acquisition of 300 credit units to a Diploma, of Master’s level, is five years. The valuable work of NTUA and its international reputation are due to its well-organized educational and research system, the quality of its staff and students, and the adequacy of its technical infrastructure. NTUA graduates were pivotal to Greece’s pre-war development and to post-war reconstruction. The graduate engineers who staffed public and private technical services and companies were and remain by general consent, equal to their European counterparts. Many have been elected to distinguished teaching and research positions in well-known universities all over the world.
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According to QS World Universities Ranking 2016, NTUA is the leading academic institution in Greece and the only one in the top 400 institutions worldwide. NTUA is in 67th place worldwide among technological universities. NTUA Faculty members publish annually more than 3.000 scientific papers (in journals, conference proceedings, chapters in volumes etc.) which earn more than 20.000 citations.
The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML) Lab is part of the School of Electrical andComputer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens and was founded after the merger of the Intelligent Systems Lab and the Image, Video, and Multimedia Systems Lab. The lab consists of 3 professors, 5 senior researchers, 7 junior researchers and 12 graduate students. Our research interests include machine learning and intelligent systems, artificial neural networks, adaptive systems, affective computing, and serious and educational games and we have participated in more than 50 research and development projects, funded mostly by EU programs (FP5, FP6, FP7, H2020, Culture/Europeana, etc.). The lab offers the following courses related to the scope of the LearnML proposal: Computer Graphics and Game Development, Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction (undergraduate level), Artificial Neural Networks, Advanced Human-computer interaction (post-graduate).
In 1997, the Greek Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT) selected AIML (then IVML), as a Service Providing Lab in its field, to be funded to acquire and install professional audiovisual equipment and to implement its ISO 9001 quality management plans. AIML became the first lab in the ECE department and only the third in the NTUA to obtain the ISO 9001 certificate for the services it provides in the areas of digital image, video and multimedia processing.
Key Personnel
Prof. Andreas-Georgios Stafylopatis
Dr. Kostas Karpouzis
Dr. Paraskevi Tzouveli
PALLADIO
KORAIS EDUCATIONAL ENTERPRISES SA (PALLADIO) is an educational organisation of private law, officially recognised by the state. Established in 1999, at present the organisation operates three primary and two secondary education private schools in Athens, Greece, under the name “Palladio School”. The approximate number of learners are 550 and the total school’s stuff around 130. The earliest form of these schools was founded in 1921 by educators and professors of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens based on the vision of cultural and humanitarian perceptions and the needs of contemporary life. The organisation’s educational philosophy is strongly committed to the principle that students are not recipients of information, but they acquire knowledge dynamically by taking initiatives, researching, testing ideas, exchanging views with their peers, trying to document their own point of view.
Key Personnel
Dr Panagiotis Karamalis
Elias Stouraitis
Science Center Malta
The Science Centre at the Directorate for Learning and Assessment Programmes within the Department for Curriculum, Lifelong Learning and Employability, Ministry for Education and Employment is the local, central body which is responsible for all the curriculum aspects of the state sector in Malta related the STEM Education (www.sciencecentremalta.net). The Education Officers at the Science Centre are curricular experts for the different STEM subjects taught, both at primary and secondary level. Together with the Education Officers responsible for the Cross-Curricular Themes present in the National Curriculum Framework, they provide professional support to educators through regular classroom visits, coordinate and deliver specialised training sessions and set national annual examination papers. The Science Centre is also actively involved in the implementation process of the National Curriculum Framework, which is presently being coordinated through the formulation of a Learning Outcomes Framework Learning Outcomes Framework for all the learning areas and cross-curricular themes, and a Learning and Assessment Programme for all the subjects. Apart from playing an advisory role in the policy making process related to STEM Education, the Science Centre is a major stakeholder and active participant in all science popularisation initiatives in Malta.
Key Personnel
Desiree Scicluna Bugeja
Stephen Bezzina
NTNU
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is Norway's university for higher education in technology and the natural sciences. NTNU has 7 faculties and 52 departments and more than 100 laboratories, many of which are national resources used both in research and teaching. With an annual turnover of approximately 700 million Euros, NTNU is recognized for broad cooperation with domestic and international trade and industry. Overall, it has research and education cooperation with more than 320 universities worldwide with prioritized geographical areas such as the EU, the USA, Japan, India and China. NTNU has proved to be an attractive partner, both on its own or together with its on-campus neighbor, SINTEF, which is Scandinavia’s largest independent research institute. NTNU is involved in 120 projects under FP7, 20 of these are Marie Curie fellowship projects. In 2003 NTNU Technology Transfer AS (TTO) was established to be even more actively involved in obtaining financing, ensuring relevant patent protection, developing ideas (often with the aid of prototyping), performing market analyses, establishing new companies and negotiating license agreements. TTO works on creating value out of research results in the form of new products or services that benefit society.
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The Information Systems and Software Engineering Group is one of the research groups at the Department of Computer Science. The research profile of the group covers the field of software development, entertainment computing, training and learning technologies and mobile and cooperative applications. The group conducts experiments and field studies with students in both formal and informal contexts. The group in the last 10 years has developed a series of STEM workshops and camps based on open source software (e.g., Scratch, Processing), recycled materials and hardware (e.g., arduino). The workshops were taking place at the creative classes of the University, ReMida center or other creative and science areas. One of the priorities of the research group is educational/learning technologies research. The group covers the various areas needed for developing and evaluating learning tools, like user interfaces, software development, collaborative technology, and e-learning.
The group has been participating in several nationally and internationally funded projects in the area. For example, Mirror (Reflective learning at work), CoCreat (Enabling creative collaboration through supportive technologies) and SIMOLA (Situated mobile language learning) are few of them. The CS department of NTNU in the last 10 years has developed a series of STEM workshops and camps based on open source software, physical materials and hardware. The workshops were taking place at the neighboring science centers (Remida center, and Deaf Museum of Trondheim) or on the Science Space of the University. The proposed project will build on NTNU’s years of conceptual, methodological and technical knowledge and experience in implementing coding, making and playful creative learning activities, and conduct various field studies based on this knowledge and experience, including the Norwegian case study grounded on NTNU’s outreach activities (Kodeløypa).
Center for Excellent IT Education–ExcITEd (2017 –2026) is an educational research center (SFU) awarded and funded from the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT). ExcITEd’s vision is to put Norway in the forefront of innovative IT education by attracting diverse talent to IT studies and profession. ExcITEd operated in close collaboration with the IT industry and the various coding clubs around Norway (http://kidsakoder.no/kodeklubben/). The SFU initiative represents a focused and long-term effort in order to stimulate the development of education and innovative approaches. More: excit-ed.com
Key Personnel
Prof. Michail Giannakos
Sofia Papavlasopoulou
