The Horizon 2020 Work Programme Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation (WIDESPREAD) 2018-2020 states that the disparity in research and innovation capabilities between the leading EU Member States and low-performing Member States (which include Malta) is significant. The basic principle of Twinning is to use the networking capacities of European leaders like DFKI and DCU to involve promising research organizations from widening countries into the circle of their European peers, thus suppressing the negative crowd-out effect sidelining institutions like UM from truly European integration.
The overall goal of the proposed project is to integrate UM’s Department of Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology (ILLT) into the European research community in the area of AI-based language technologies. This will be achieved (i) by significantly strengthening its research and innovation capacities as well as its reputation in the scientific community with the aim of creating a European-level Centre of Excellence in this field in Malta (Widening Country) and (ii) by maximizing the research management and administrative capacities of both UM’s research staff as well as its Research Support office, thus ensuring sustainable growth of UM as a whole.
