Angelo Dalli


Angelo Dalli is a computer scientist specialising in artificial intelligence, a serial entrepreneur, and business angel investor.

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 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 before reading for his PhD at the University of Sheffield under the supervision of Yorick Wilks. Dalli has published over 20 peer reviewed papers in the artificial intelligence and natural language processing 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 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 and sequence alignment.
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

Ethical AI

Angelo has been a vocal proponent of ethical AI that impacts society positively and believes that AI should be properly regulated. Angelo has been appointed by the Government of Malta on the taskforce that will produce Malta's new AI regulation and national AI strategy, and is an active member of the AAAI, ACM and the ACL.

AI in transport

Angelo had led the introduction of different machine learning techniques in intelligent transport systems, including parking, controlled vehicle access zones and dynamic traffic interchange control. His transport solutions company, Traffiko, created ITS solutions in Europe, Australia and the Middle East, and was eventually sold to Q-Free in Norway in 2015.

AI in gaming

Angelo is a well known speaker in the online gambling industry.
Angelo setup on of the first companies that applied artificial intelligence in the online gambling industry, called Bit8, with the most notable work being on algorithms that estimate and maximise player lifetime value and personalised bonusing systems. These techniques have since been widely adopted by the online gambling industry Intralot subsequently bought Bit8 in 2017.

AI in art

Angelo has been collaborating with the Maltese artist Mark Mallia via his AI company Umnai to teach AI about creativity. The results of this collaboration is the Uma AI entity, short for Universal Machine Artist. Uma has been taught how to paint by Mark Mallia, and is creating original artwork using a modified Generative adversarial network that has a third component, the human artist, to produce different learning results than a standard GAN. The underlying discriminator in Uma started from an anti-fraud detection system. 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 angel investor active in the high-tech startup scene and a member of EBAN. Angelo has been encouraging Maltese startups via various public events including the Zest and Budding Rockstars conferences. Angelo has had a number of successful exits in transport and gaming.

Awards and honours

Entrepreneurial and scientific