French newspaper “Le Monde” reported on Morocco’s advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) and the progress of the Moroccan Artificial Intelligence Center, co-founded in 2021 by the Office Cherifien de Phosphates (OCP) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and housed by the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P).
In an article published on Thursday, Le Monde highlighted that the center is the fertilizer giant’s main investment in the AI technological revolution. A pioneering project at a time when Morocco has been slow to adopt an action plan with respect to AI, the center was designed to serve the African continent and is proof of the ambition of its Moroccan co-sponsor, which has already invested heavily in education and the energy transition.
Although MIT is a model for the Moroccan AI movement center, there is a huge gap in the amount of resources the two institutions have deployed. While the top American university has invested over a billion dollars in its school dedicated to artificial intelligence, the Moroccan center is receiving only about one million euros a year from OCP.
As of 2023, corporate-funded research contracts and income from training courses had boosted its budget to 3.5 million euros, which is more than its Saudi counterpart ICAIRE or its Slovenian counterpart IRCAI.
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, from the CNRS-Sorbonne University computer science laboratory (LIP6), supervises the center’s seven teacher-researchers and eighteen doctoral students who are working on concrete solutions to problems such as inequality, energy consumption, and sustainable cities.
One of their flagship projects is a mobile application that scans documents written in French or English and transforms them into an audio file in Darija, the Moroccan dialect.
“The number of illiterate women in rural areas in Morocco is still very high. With this application, they can understand personal documents, such as medical prescriptions, without having to share them with third parties,” explains doctoral student Houda Saffi.
Youssef Osrhir, Reda El Marhouch, and Yahiya Moukhlis are working on other areas including the optimization of energy consumption in deploying drone swarms, ensuring autonomous navigation, and decentralizing decision-making to increase the number of vehicles
The center also supports bringing project leaders from other African countries, mainly women, to dispel the traditional view that science is a man’s domain, declared Seghrouchni. She chose to name AI Movement’s main amphitheater after Fatima Al Fihriya, the founder of Al Quaraouiyine University in Fez in the 9th century, considered to be the oldest university in the world still in operation.
In this year’s cohort, a woman from Benin, where a third of the rural population has no access to drinking water, has designed an intelligent water filtering solution. Another, from Tanzania, where poultry parasites are a major problem, has developed an application that detects chicken diseases from their droppings.
“The question now is how to sell these emerging innovations,” noted Seghrouchni, who sees the lack of funding sources as the weak point of AI in Africa.
The plan to establish a continent-wide roadmap will be one of the issues at stake at the African AI Summit to be held from June 3 to 5 this year which will be hosted by the Center. Seghrouchni hopes ministers and representatives of the African Union will attend the event that will focus on the continent’s priorities: the energy transition, climate change, food security, education and employment.
“Nearly 80% of the United Nations’ development goals can be achieved or improved through AI,” she told Le Monde.