Mr Stephen Camilleri, a Master's degree graduand from the Department of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Information & Communication Technology, has been awarded an Outstanding Student Poster award for his poster entitled 'Investigating the relationship between earthquakes and online news'. The poster was presented at the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna, April 2019.  

Mr Camilleri’s research project, involved the development of a software tool that uses text mining to automatically map and report earthquake events, in near real-time, using multilingual online newspaper articles from around the world. The tool paves the way for more in-depth analysis of the spatial and temporal correlation between media reporting and the nature of the event.  

One of the judges’ comments was that the software tool has potentially important applications in other fields of interest, besides earthquakes. A technical paper  describing the computer algorithm has also been presented and published at the IEEE Second International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering in Sardinia, 2019. 

Mr Camilleri, who successfully defended his thesis last May, was supervised by Dr Joel Azzopardi,  from the Department of Artificial Intelligence, and Dr Matthew Agius, from the Department of Geosciences, Faculty of Science.