Professional staff from ADAPT’s Research Development and Education & Public Engagement teams delivered a series of research and innovation capacity building workshops at the University of Malta as part of the EU-funded LT-BRIDGE project.
LT-BRIDGE aims to integrate the University of Malta’s Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology and Department of AI into the European research community, in the area of AI-based language technologies. ADAPT and the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) are collaborating to create a European-level Centre of Excellence in this field in Malta.
As part of the visit Dr John Judge, Head of Research Development at ADAPT, met with the Pro Rector for Research, and the heads and directors of various research support units to help shape the drive to improve R&I capacity at University of Malta. In parallel the team are delivering a diverse programme of capacity-building workshops for staff in areas including accessing European funding, post-award management, research design, engaged research, open science, and career development planning.
The LT-BRIDGE Innovation and Research Management capacity-building programme is designed to allow the University of Malta to draw on the project partnership with ADAPT to extend and improve its portfolio of services oriented towards the needs of national, regional and European public authorities, businesses and NGOs.
The project’s Scientific Strategy and corresponding research and innovation programme of LT-BRIDGE is addressing mutually-relevant research topics jointly shaping important new applied research areas. As a result, the project will foster young research teams in the University of Malta who are capable of carrying out competitive research in the priority scientific areas at a European level.
Dr Claudia Borg, Project Coordinator of LT-Bridge and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at University of Malta (UM), said: “LT-Bridge has provided University of Malta staff with a unique opportunity to interact and learn from ADAPT staff. The University of Malta has been working on a number of strategic themes, including Research and Knowledge Transfer. The workshops are providing a good basis for UM staff to continue reshaping their strategy and implement it. They have also led to a number of key meetings with various staff members to discuss how the various departments and institutes could streamline their work more efficiently. This has been the first in-person meeting that LT-Bridge has hosted in Malta and it has set the foundation for future training collaborations between UM and ADAPT.”
Dr John Judge, Head of Research Development at ADAPT added: “This is a fantastic opportunity to work more closely with our international colleagues and share the learnings from the last seven years of doing research development in ADAPT. The cross-institutional model of the Centre is unusual and disruptive to traditional research support organisational approaches. However, in ADAPT we have used this opportunity to learn from multiple organisational practices and create an agile responsive approach to research development that’s proving highly effective. I am delighted to have this opportunity to see this come full circle and work on a project focused on sharing this knowledge to move the dial for another research organisation that’s looking to grow”.
