Angelo Dalli (born 14 April 1978) is a computer scientist specialising in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

, a

serial entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entrepreneu ...

, and business

angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible de ...

Early life and education

Dalli was born in

Malta Malta, officially the Republic of Malta, is an island country in Southern Europe located in the Mediterranean Sea, between Sicily and North Africa. It consists of an archipelago south of Italy, east of Tunisia, and north of Libya. The two ...

and grew up in the town of

Birżebbuġa Birżebbuġa (; sometimes shortened to B'Buġa) is a seaside town in the Southern Region, Malta, Southern Region of Malta, close to Marsaxlokk. It is approximately from the capital Valletta, and has a population of 9,736 as of March 2014. The ...

. Dalli was educated at the Archbishop's Seminary, Malta and represented Malta in the Young European Environmental Research contest held in Cologne in 1994. Dalli represented Malta in the

International Olympiad in Informatics The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual competitive programming competition and one of the International Science Olympiads Student competition, for secondary school students. The first IOI was held in 1989 in Pravetz, Bulgar ...

held in Eindhoven in 1995, where he won a bronze medal. Dalli started selling computer software as a teenager, and worked for the

International Data Group International Data Group (IDG, Inc.) is an American market intelligence and demand generation company focused on the technology industry. IDG, Inc.'s mission is centered around supporting the technology industry through research, data, market ...

as a freelance contributor for

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online-only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tec ...

Academic work

After graduating from the

University of Malta The University of Malta (, UM, formerly UOM) is a higher education institution in Malta. It offers undergraduate bachelor's degrees, postgraduate master's degrees and postgraduate doctorates. It is a member of the European University Association, ...

, Dalli spent time lecturing on

and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

before reading for his PhD at the

University of Sheffield The University of Sheffield (informally Sheffield University or TUOS) is a public university, public research university in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Its history traces back to the foundation of Sheffield Medical School in 1828, Fir ...

under the supervision of

Yorick Wilks Yorick Alexander Wilks FBCS (27 October 1939 – 14 April 2023) was a British computer scientist. He was an emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, visiting professor of artificial intelligence at Gresham ...

. Dalli has published over 23 peer reviewed papers in the

and

fields, including one of the earliest methods on timestamp extraction from documents that is now commonly used in most email applications. Angelo has also contributed to the encoding of European languages in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, in particular for the

Common Locale Data Repository The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is a project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in XML format for use in computer applications. CLDR contains locale-specific information that an operating system will typically provide to ...

. In the field of

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

Dalli has found a particularly useful integer sequence which efficiently computes all alignments of strings of length 3 together with other generalisations , for applications in

natural language A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...

and

sequence alignment In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural biology, structural, or evolutionary relationships between ...

. Dalli has an

Erdős number The Erdős number () describes the "collaborative distance" between mathematician Paul Erdős and another person, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers. The same principle has been applied in other fields where a particular individual ...

of 3. Dalli has led the Maltese national informatics team in the

at IOI 2002 in

Seoul Seoul, officially Seoul Special Metropolitan City, is the capital city, capital and largest city of South Korea. The broader Seoul Metropolitan Area, encompassing Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Incheon, emerged as the world's List of cities b ...

, South Korea and IOI 2004 in

Athens Athens ( ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Greece, largest city of Greece. A significant coastal urban area in the Mediterranean, Athens is also the capital of the Attica (region), Attica region and is the southe ...

, Greece.

Artificial intelligence

Trustworthy AI and Hybrid Intelligence

Angelo has been a vocal proponent of trustworthy AI that impacts society positively and believes that AI should be properly regulated. Angelo has co-founded UMNAI in 2019, with the aim of creating a new form of trustworthy AI that can explain the decisions and steps that the AI has taken to output an answer, based on a

neurosymbolic AI Neuro-symbolic AI is a type of artificial intelligence that integrates neural and symbolic AI architectures to address the weaknesses of each, providing a robust AI capable of reasoning, learning, and cognitive modeling. As argued by Leslie Valia ...

architecture that combines

neural In biology, the nervous system is the highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes t ...

and

symbolic AI Symbolic may refer to: * Symbol, something that represents an idea, a process, or a physical entity Mathematics, logic, and computing * Symbolic computation, a scientific area concerned with computing with mathematical formulas * Symbolic dynamic ...

in an auditable and certain manner.

AI and society

Angelo led the

Government of Malta The Government of Malta () is the executive branch of the Republic of Malta. It is made up of the Cabinet and the Parliamentary Secretaries. The Prime Minister is appointed by the President of Malta The president of Malta () is the cons ...

taskforce that produced Malta's new AI regulation and national AI strategy, and is an active member of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

AAAI The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

, ACM and the ACL.

AI in transport

Angelo had led the introduction of different machine learning techniques in intelligent transport systems (ITS), including parking, controlled vehicle access zones and dynamic traffic interchange control. His intelligent transport company, Traffiko, operated in Europe, Australia and the Middle East, and was eventually sold to

Q-Free Q-Free ASA (Q-Free) is a supplier of Tolling, Traffic Management and Connected ITS (C-ITS)/Connected Vehicle solutions with headquarters in Trondheim, Norway. The company has approximately 380 employees with 17 offices around the world and traded ...

in Norway in 2015.

AI in gaming

Angelo is a well known speaker in the

online gambling Online gambling (also known as iGaming or iGambling) is any kind of gambling conducted on the internet. This includes virtual poker, casinos, and sports betting. The first online gambling venue opened to the general public was ticketing for th ...

industry. Angelo setup one of the first companies that applied

in the

industry, called Bit8 (now part of

Intralot INTRALOT is a Greek company that supplies integrated gambling, transaction processing systems, game content, sports betting management and interactive gambling services, to state-licensed gambling organizations worldwide. The company acts both as ...

), with the most notable work being on algorithms that estimate and maximise player

lifetime value In marketing, customer lifetime value (CLV or often CLTV), lifetime customer value (LCV), or life-time value (LTV) is a prognostication of the net profit contributed to the whole future relationship with a customer. The prediction model can have ...

and personalised bonusing systems. These techniques have since been widely adopted by the

industry Intralot subsequently bought Bit8 in 2017.

AI and creativity

Angelo has been collaborating various artists and creatives to teach AI about creativity. The results of this collaboration is the

UMA Uma may refer to: Religion * Uma (goddess), a Hindu goddess also known as Parvati or Gauri People * Uma (given name), including a list of people with the name * Uma (actress) (Uma Shankari, fl from 2000), Indian actress Nature * ''Uma'' (liza ...

AI entity, short for Universal Machine Artist. Angelo has also co-founded the Creative Science and Arts Institute to act as a foundation for future research into AI, science, technology and creativity. UMA is creating original artwork using a modified

Generative adversarial network A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of machine learning frameworks and a prominent framework for approaching generative artificial intelligence. The concept was initially developed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in June ...

has a third component, the human artist, to produce different learning results than standard

generative AI Generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models learn the underlying patterns and str ...

models. The underlying discriminator in UMA started from an anti-fraud detection system and has now gradually evolved to add

stable diffusion Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on Diffusion model, diffusion techniques. The generative artificial intelligence technology is the premier product of Stability AI and is considered to be a part of ...

and

procedural generation In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated content and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. I ...

methods. The first two artworks generated by UMA were auctioned in October and November 2018 respectively, with all proceeds donated to charity and good causes. Ongoing work in improving UMA and furthering collaboration with other artists is ongoing. Notable exhibitions include Tomorrow's Blossoms with Selina Scerri at Esplora Museum in 2024, which explored the theme of AI and emotions.

Angel investor

Angelo is an

active in the high-tech startup scene, and is a member of

EBAN Eban may refer to: *Eban (name) Eban () is both a given name and a surname. Notable people with the name include: Surname *Abba Eban (1915–2002), Israeli diplomat and politician, and a scholar of the Arabic and Hebrew languages. *Eli Eban, Isr ...

, and World Business Angel Forum senator. Angelo has been encouraging Maltese startups via various public events including the Zest and Budding Rockstars conferences and co-founded BAM, the Malta Business Angel network, in 2019.

Awards and honours

Entrepreneurial and scientific

* Bronze Medal,

(1995) * Malta Top Entrepreneur Award (2019) * Malta Top Entrepreneur Award (2014) *

WIPO The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO; (OMPI)) is one of the 15 specialized agencies of the United Nations (UN). Pursuant to the 1967 Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO was created to pr ...

IP Enterprise Award for the UMNAI Neuro-symbolic AI architecture (2022)

Corporate awards

Bit8 EGR Rising Star Award (2014) *

Bit8 Malta Communication Authority eBusiness Award for the Best B2B application (2015) *

Bit8 Malta iGaming Award for Excellence (2017)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dalli, Angelo 1978 births Living people Machine learning researchers Artificial intelligence researchers Natural language processing researchers Alumni of the University of Sheffield