Prof. Charlie Abela is an Associate Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence within the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta. He holds an MSc in Computer Science specializing in conversational case-based reasoning, and completed his doctoral research on knowledge work and information management support measures inspired by human forgetting. During his doctoral studies, he worked as a research assistant at the Digital Research Enterprise Institute in Ireland (DERI), now the Insight research center for data analytics.
Prof. Abela's research focuses on Enterprise Knowledge Graphs, Graph Representation Learning, and Generative AI, with applications spanning digital transformation in healthcare and the humanities. Enterprise Knowledge Graphs arrange organizational data as networks of connected entities to reduce fragmentation and highlight relationships, while Graph Representation Learning maps graph entities to low-dimensional vectors while preserving structural relationships.
He has led nationally significant research initiatives combining these technologies with real-world applications. Notarypedia pioneered semantic analysis of historical notarial records using knowledge graph representation to extract entities and relationships from Latin manuscripts. medicX represents an AI-powered knowledge management system supporting pharmacists with polypharmacy management, pharmacodynamics, and drug-drug interaction detection. The system integrates structured biomedical data with explainable AI tools to enhance medication safety and clinical decision-making. He also contributed to the AMPS Research Excellence project, that developed a TRL4 AI prototype for automating professional support services in the legal domain.
ICT3909 - Final Year Project in Artificial Intelligence
Research Projects
Notarypedia Knowledge Management Platform Jan 2025 - Present This three-year, AI-led project aims to revolutionize access to historical manuscripts by merging AI with the Humanities. It is a collaboration between the University of Malta’s Faculty of ICT and the Notarial Archives Foundation, with funding from the Ministry for National Heritage, the Arts and Local Government.
AMPS (AI meets the Maltese Courts) Oct 2023 - April 2025 Funded by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, this project is a joint initiative between the Faculties of Laws and ICT. It investigates using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to predict the outcomes of Maltese court cases, focusing on the Small Claims Tribunal.
medicX-KE: Knowledge Graph based Explainability for Drug-Drug Interactions Sep 2022 - Feb 2024 Funded by an MDIA AI Applied Research Grant, this project extended the medicX system to provide explainability for drug-drug interactions using deep graph models. The goal was to make complex data searchable and accessible for healthcare professionals, aligning with my work in developing AI systems for healthcare.
Autonomous Diagnostic System Aug 2021 - December 2022 This research collaboration with Corel Malta Ltd. was funded by the Malta Enterprise R&D scheme. The project developed a prototype using graph-based learning to detect software anomalies, leading to a plug-in for the Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS). This work contributed to my expertise in creating AI platforms for risk assessment.
Notarypedia Mar 2018 - Apr 2020 In collaboration with the Notarial Archives and the Office of the Notary to Government, this project focused on making historical archives widely accessible. An AI platform was developed to automatically extract data from manuscripts into a Knowledge Graph, alongside a suite of tools to support archival staff in cataloging documents.
