The Malta Internet Foundation recently awarded the 2009 prize in favour of academic work making a significant contribution to Internet technologies.
This year, the theme for the prize was work involving Geographical Information Systems (GISs) that made use of the Internet and which addressed a need particularly relevant to the Maltese context.
Winning Team
The Prize was awarded to John J. Camilleri, Keane Cassar, Lukas Galea and Michael Grech all of whom are reading for the BSc. IT Hons at the University of Malta within the Faculty of ICT. The work was carried out as a group practical task under the supervision of Dr. John Abela of the Department of Intelligent Computer Systems.
Winning Project
A system to aid the general public in making decisions about installing renewable energy technologies was designed and implemented, the overall objectives being to service users over the internet, allowing them to analyse any area selected on Windows Live Maps.
The selected area is split into cells and the user can choose an available renewable source of energy to be graded, prompting the system to check how efficient that source is in every cell of the selected area. The efficiency is calculated by checking the performances of a number of relevant products were they to be deployed in that area. Finally, each cell is coloured according to this efficiency, giving the user a clear indication of how ideal the area is for that renewable source.
Award Ceremony
The cash prize was presented to the winning team by Prof. Juanito Camilleri.
The date of the award, 18th November, coincided with GIS Day which is celebrated every year to raise geographic awareness across the world through GIS technologies.
The Foundation will shortly be announcing the theme for next year's award.