Thursday, July 19, 2007 by Dr Christopher Staff
New ICT degrees at the University of Malta
Information technology degrees at the University of Malta have changed. The newly created Faculty of Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) is offering a new BSc ICT honours degree that replaces the four-year BSc IT (Hons). The
new degree lasts three years and offers a flexible range of study programmes that allow students to target their particular
interests and aspirations within the very broad area encompassed by ICT.
The study programmes currently available are: ICT; computer science and artificial intelligence (AI); computer information
systems; and communications and computer engineering. Some of these include the option to study a subsidiary area.
The focus of this article is on computer science and AI with creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship as a subsidiary area.
There is a bright partnership between all these.
According to the EU, a country can generate wealth by ensuring that research-capable graduates in science and technology
can make positive contributions to the knowledge economy. Ideally, graduates can recognise and grasp opportunities to
create or identify a product that can be commercialised.
It is no coincidence that some of the countries in the world with the best performing economies have a high number of
creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial science and technology graduates.
Some science and technology students are born with the knack of seeing and seizing business opportunities, but increasingly,
these skills are being taught.
The area of computer science and AI already demands creative solutions from students and practitioners.
Students of computer science learn about different types of computational problems. They learn that some problems do not
have a known solution, but they are nonetheless very interesting and important problems to solve, and students need a
principled and creative approach to design feasible and innovative solutions.
Students learn about systems programming and high-performance computing, which try to squeeze every last ounce of
processing power out of computers to create environments for problems requiring solutions that are incredibly resource
hungry.
Students of artificial intelligence learn about systems that approximate human behaviour, even though we only partially
understand how that behaviour arises. For example, students will investigate how a computer can understand and
communicate using a natural language like English or Maltese, and how a computer can learn by observing what's happening
in its environment to be a helpful assistant to ordinary or expert computer users. Students will also carry out research and
help to build the semantic web, the next generation of the World Wide Web.
Software engineering techniques help students develop structured and principled approaches to understand what users
require of their computer systems, so that students can design, develop, and test, computer systems and applications with
confidence.
The Edward de Bono Institute for the Design and Development of Thinking at the University of Malta has been offering
Masters degrees in creativity and innovation for the last few years, attracting many overseas and local students.
Now, for the first time, the institute is offering a subsidiary area in creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship to BSc
(Hons) ICT computer science and AI students in the Faculty of ICT.
This subsidiary area is a specially designed course with carefully selected complementary study-units that are available in
each semester of the three years of the computer science and AI honours degree programme. Students will learn to use
different methods to generate ideas, what creativity is all about, and the relationship between innovation and
entrepreneurship. Students can choose certain combinations of study units including innovation and design, critical thinking,
using foresight as a tool for scenarios and visions, creativity and innovation for youth and NGOs, communication, media,
ICT, and innovation, leadership and organisational innovation, and creativity, innovation, and digital technologies.
Through the degree combination of BSc (Hons) ICT computer science and AI with creativity, innovation, and
entrepreneurship, students will develop skills that are useful whether they decide to continue their studies at postgraduate
level or to join the world of work, either by starting their own business as an entrepreneur or as an employee.
For more information about the ICT degree programmes, please visit the Faculty of ICT website at
http://www.um.edu.mt/ict. For general information about the Edward de Bono Institute visit http://home.um.edu.mt/create
Dr Staff is a senior lecturer in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the new Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta.