The big list of academic writing resources

This blog post will be updated regularly. Academic writing is a craft. Like all crafts, it requires practice, but it can also be learned. Unfortunately, resources to learn academic writing are somewhat scattered. In this blog post, I lost some of my suggested resources, including books and blogs, tools to help you write better, and other resources to improve your visualizations. Accompanying this post is The Big List of Academic Writing Tips....

August 12, 2023

The big list of academic writing tips

This blog post will be updated regularly. When I started my PhD, I hated writing academically. I love writing, and I have freelanced as a writer for years, but I hated writing academically. I hated the process and I hated the end-product. It is a common feeling, but I decided to study scientific writing and, more specifically, how to lend my character to it while staying within the norms. This blog post contains tricks that I learned to take control of the story, the grammar and the form of academic writing....

August 6, 2023

A requiem for Twitter: what science has lost

Twitter is dead. Technically, it is still alive—barely—but for scientific research, it is as good as dead. Twitter’s demise did not start with the saturation of blue ticks, nor with the nonsensical limits on daily views. It started and ended with cordoning off access to the Twitter API; now, it costs $5,000 per month for 1,000,000 tweets—a tenth of what academics previously got for free. I started researching on Twitter in 2016....

July 2, 2023

Can Twitter help break the news?

This article was written by Iggy Fenech and published in the 2022 Faculty of ICT Exhibition magazine. The article is being reproduced as it appeared originally. PhD in AI student NICHOLAS MAMO has spent years working on an Artificially Intelligent system that can alert journalists to news stories breaking on social media. Here he explains how it works. The consumption of news has come a long way since the early days of the newspaper....

July 26, 2022

Feature-pivot algorithms: a brief introduction

In my previous post, I took a look at document-pivot methods in Topic Detection and Tracking. Document-pivot approaches use clustering to find out what people are talking about, but that’s not the only solution. In this post, I take a look at feature-pivot methods, the second type of Topic Detection and Tracking methods. Instead of looking at what people are talking about, these approaches look at how people are talking to detect that something happened....

August 6, 2020

Document-pivot algorithms: a brief introduction

Topic Detection and Tracking has been around for more than 20 years, but during this time, there has been a lot of research. When researchers started creating systems, they went off in a few different directions. Earlier, I took a brief look at Topic Detection and Tracking. In this post I take a look at one of the two main approaches to solving the problem: document-pivot methods. Picture this: you’re out and about when you hear someone say the phrase “free hamburger....

July 27, 2020

Event tracking: a brief introduction

Topic Detection and Tracking is not an old research area. It was ‘only’ established in the late 90’s and it didn’t really pick up until a few years later. However, a lot has happened since then and today’s research is almost unrecognizable from back then. In this post, I take a brief look at what Topic Detection and Tracking is and at its history. What’s Topic Detection and Tracking? First things first: what is Topic Detection and Tracking or, less formally, event tracking?...

July 18, 2020

If machines could watch football

This article was originally published on the Times of Malta and appeared in the Sunday Times of Malta on 10 March, 2019. The article is being reproduced as it appeared originally. One out of every two people watched part of the FIFA World Cup last year. Yet in spite of the sport’s popularity, there is no robot that could sit next to you on a weekend afternoon, sip on a cold beer, and contemplate your team’s woes and successes....

July 17, 2020

About events

Events have been a big part of my life since 2016. My name is Nicholas Mamo and I’m a doctoral student at the University of Malta. 2016 is the year when I started working on my undergraduate dissertation and the subject was events. More specifically, the research area I chose for my undergraduate dissertation was Topic Detection and Tracking: a subset of Artificial Intelligence that builds timelines for events. That sounds simple, but it’s not....

July 16, 2020