Angelo Dalli (born 14 April 1978) is a computer scientist specialising in artificial intelligence, a serial entrepreneur, 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 for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...

Early life and education

Dalli was born in Malta and grew up in the town of Birżebbuġa. 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 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 a 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, marketing technol ...

as a freelance contributor for PC World.

Academic work

After graduating from the University of Malta, Dalli spent time lecturing on artificial intelligence and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

before reading for his PhD at the University of Sheffield under the supervision of

Yorick Wilks Yorick Wilks FBCS (born 27 October 1939), a British computer scientist, is emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, visiting professor of artificial intelligence at Gresham College (a post created especially ...

. Dalli has published over 23 peer reviewed papers in the artificial intelligence 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, in particular for the Common Locale Data Repository. In the field of

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

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 In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. 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, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. Alig ...

. Dalli has an Erdős number of 3. Dalli has led the Maltese national informatics team in the International Olympiad in Informatics at IOI 2002 in Seoul, South Korea and IOI 2004 in Athens, Greece.

Artificial intelligence

Trustworthy AI

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 architecture that combines

neural In Biology, biology, the nervous system is the Complex system, highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its Behavior, actions and Sense, sensory information by transmitting action potential, signals to and from different parts of its ...

and

symbolic AI In artificial intelligence, symbolic artificial intelligence is the term for the collection of all methods in artificial intelligence research that are based on high-level symbolic (human-readable) representations of problems, logic and search. S ...

in an auditable and certain manner.

AI and Society

Angelo led the Government of Malta taskforce that produced Malta's new AI regulation and national AI strategy, and is an active member of the IEEE, AAAI,

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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 () is a supplier of Tolling, Parking, 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 has ...

in Norway in 2015.

AI in Gaming

Angelo is a well known speaker in the online gambling industry. Angelo setup one of the first companies that applied artificial intelligence in the online gambling 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 gaming organizations worldwide. The company acts both as a ...

), 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 online gambling 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 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 has a third component, the human artist, to produce different learning results than standard generative AI models. The underlying discriminator in UMA started from an anti-fraud detection system and has now gradually evolved to add stable diffusion and procedural generation 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.

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, European business investment organization * Eban, Dzheyrakhsky District, village in the Republic of Ingushetia, Russia See also * * Eban number *Eben Eben is a name of Hebrew origin. It is sometimes short f ...

, 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, International Olympiad in Informatics (1995) * Malta Top Entrepreneur Award (2019) * Malta Top Entrepreneur Award (2014)

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