“It is only the expertise, the ability and the will to work that will bring on success,” said Professor Paul Micallef, chairman of the Board of Studies for Information Technology, at the launch of the annual IT Students’ Project Exhibition at the Computing building of the University of Malta last Tuesday. The official opening was attended by Lawrence Zammit, head of Technology in Education, and Dr V. Nezval, lecturer at the B.Sc.I.T. Claudia Borg, a students’ representative, also delivered a speech on behalf of her fellow students.

This is the eighth year that the Board of Studies for Information Technology has organised this exhibition, which includes the students’ final year projects. According to Prof. Micallef, the projects are an important component of the grades obtained at the final classification board. Indeed, the students have been working on their projects – with the help of their lecturers who often gave them ideas in the field of their own researches – for at least six months. This year there are some 44 projects on display. They range from system management application to system modelling to theoretical measurement techniques, with for example Claudia Borg’s “Scheduling appointment via e-mail”, a “Family tree organizer and tracer” by Joseph Schembri, a “Semantic web search engine” created by Anna Maria Cassola and Christopher Grech’s “3D Object reconstruction from digital images”.

The aim of the exhibition is for the students to show their work both to the IT industry and to the public in general – especially potential future students. Indeed Prof. Micallef insisted on the fact that the event was also a way of attracting industry which would be interested in the students’ work, and to strenghten the links between the university and industry. “We value the links we already have with industry and we hope they will grow in the future,” he said. In fact many people from the IT industry were present at the opening ceremony and Prof. Micallef expected more to visit during the two days of the exhibition (6 and 7 July). Some of the students’ projects were actually sponsored by Maltese industry. For instance, the “Interactive GIS tool for mapping the medium voltage supply network of Enemalta Corporation”, by Ivan Borg and its second part, the “GIS network configuration management database” by Jason Pace, were both sponsored by Enemalta Corporation. They have even signed a two-year contract with Enemalta. Most of the other students have also found jobs or are planning to spend a year (or more) abroad and keep on studying. So this should already meet Prof. Micallef’s wish that his students “meet the market”. And as he said, the projects will be “the flagship that each student carries in her or his first experience as a full time employee in industry.”