Graduation Ceremony 19
Friday 4 December 2015 at 1630hrs – Jesuits Church Valletta
Graduation Oration
Prof. Ing. Carl James Debono B.Eng.(Hons.),Ph.D.(Pavia),M.I.E.E.E.,M.I.E.E.
First of all I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to all the graduates –
Congratulations on your achievement! Reaching this stage in your life was not an easy feat,
the journey was long and sometimes exasperating, thus there is a lot to celebrate and be
proud of. Our country should feel fortunate and be proud to have you in the workforce new professionals driving the country for the coming years.
Today we are honouring the achievements of the postgraduate students from the Faculty of
Information and Communication Technology, Faculty of Economics, Management and
Accountancy, Edward de Bono Institute for the Design and Development of Thinking, and
the Institute for Tourism, Travel and Culture. These are sectors that form an appreciable
component of the Maltese economy. You are ambassadors of the University of Malta and I
am sure that you will strive to do your utmost to provide exemplary work services wherever
life will take you.
Behind your success lie many sacrifices including financial, lack of sleep, and most of all a
decision to make study one of your priorities. These could not be overcome without the
support of your families and friends who are celebrating with you today.
You will now start a new stage in your life. I hope that you treasure the positive experiences
during your time at University and you can assert that it was worthwhile.
In this landmark day, I will share some of my thoughts and views with a focus on research.
Research is one of the main pillars of a University as links between lecturing material and
research open novel viewpoints where postgraduate graduates can work on and develop
new products and processes. Research output also benchmarks the quality of a University
and its members of staff. Thus, it goes without saying that investment in research is of
utmost importance to be relevant in today’s academic and industrial environment. In the
last years, efforts have been made to make our research more visible to the community.
However, it is still a general feeling that the public sees the University just as a teaching
institution, with some even relegating it to a school.
I started my career at the University as a research engineer within the Faculty of Engineering
and later progressed to become a lecturer in 2001. After some time, my department moved
to the Faculty of ICT, a difficult decision at that time but necessary due to the increasing
software components that were forming part of the computer and telecommunication
systems. Most of the research at that time was pointing in that direction and as the
postgraduate students from the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology can
attest today, software plays an important part of our daily lives. Research in ICT evolves on a
very fast track demanding continuous monitoring and updating of new concepts and
standards in the different fields. This makes long term research challenging and exciting.
Research in such a domain is coupled with opportunity especially for new start-ups which
can boost today’s economy.
Working in research and development is very rewarding. One cannot describe the feeling
when your contribution ends up in a product which is appreciated or used by a large number
of people. Take video as an example, we are now accustomed to capture images and video
from our smartphones. The history shows that one of the first moving pictures was captured
by Eadweard Muybridge. What prompted this work was a wager; to see whether a
racehorse’s hooves are at any point in time all off the ground simultaneously. The solution
was to set up a line of cameras with tripwire to capture the horse as it ran by. The result
settled the debate. This shows that research is driven by a need. Today, after more than a
century we are in an era where videos are captured by anyone from a mobile device. The
concept is take it, see how it looks, and share it. All this has to be done fast and in an
inexpensive way. To be inexpensive, of the order of around five Euros, the sensors cannot
produce high definition imagery, so the solution lies in better capture protocols and smart
algorithms. This field is now multidisciplinary and involves areas of photography, computer
vision, image processing, and computer graphics.
As this example has shown, multiple disciplines are now coming together to develop new
and more complex systems. This demands more interaction between researchers from
different fields both locally and abroad. No researcher can stand alone and our graduates
need to learn how to network, manage teams, projects, and communicate effectively with
other professionals.
Through the various institutes, the University of Malta stimulates interdisciplinary research
in a number of areas allowing students to interact with staff and other students coming from
different backgrounds.
Any research activity requires adequate funding. Although some progress has been made
through the setting up of the Research Innovation and Development Trust (RIDT) fund,
University research funds, and competitive programmes, such as the Malta Council for
Science and Technology’s research and innovation funds and European Union programmes,
we are still very limited in what we can do.
More investment in research is needed to meet the European target expenditure of 3% of
the GDP. Industry needs to take a more active role in research and open up to postgraduate
student research capabilities. More dialogue and funding from Industry is paramount to
focus research on the Industry needs and ensuring a stable and knowledgeable workforce.
However, this should not preclude other funding opportunities for basic research. The
government is supporting students through scholarships but most of the time the support
provided is not competitive to other universities in Europe and beyond. For instance in
certain foreign universities, Ph.D. students in Engineering and ICT are offered a relatively
good salary from the scholarships. Moreover, these scholarships are not being offered to
foreign non-resident students, as other Universities do, drastically limiting the potential
Ph.D. enrolment. We regularly receive requests from non-EU nationals to enrol in a Ph.D.
programme but later finish at another university due to the costs and lack of funding
opportunities. A competitive funding scheme needs to be set up to attract these students
and bring in new ideas from different cultures. The University of Malta has a long tradition in
teaching and is very attractive to students and researchers from Europe and beyond.
The University of Malta is facing several challenges in a fast changing environment including
part-time working students, the Internet and online courses, competition, changing
education legislation, diversity of the student body on campus, and limited funding for
research. We have no choice but to recognise these challenges and strive to keep the
University of Malta the place where the most able students from Malta, and beyond, want
to come because they are guaranteed the best education. The periodic programme review
and quality assurance procedures, although sometimes painful, are a step in the right
direction but more needs to be done in a holistic way to improve use of resources and avoid
replication of effort.
Finally to our Masters and PhD graduates, these are my words of advice:
“Dream” – Keep always on the lookout on how to improve a process, a service or a product
and dream on finding new opportunities. You are the people who can form start-ups and
contribute heavily to the economy. Do not be afraid of change!
“Discover” – Look up the ideas you dream about, see what is available and what is missing to
make it real. You are now trained for this!
“Develop” – Design and develop the new product, process or service. Make your dream
come true.
“Disseminate” – Let the world know what you did and sell your product. If you do not
advertise and display your work, nobody will know about it. This is the way to make the
world a better place!
Congratulations, thank you.