Eight Moroccan AI talents in top laboratories
Many Moroccan research talents are working in international laboratories. Benefiting from conditions that enable them to excel, they are enjoying successful careers. Among them are eight promising young researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
They will be meeting next February in Benguerir, as part of the Science Week organized by the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P), where they will present their work.
«These researchers were not selected at random. They have achieved an extraordinary feat: that of having a scientific paper accepted at the most prestigious AI conference in its modern form: NeurIPS», notes Rachid Guerraoui, who will bring these young researchers together in the event’s «Computing day» on February 13. Guerraoui, Director of the Distributed Computing Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), is himself among the world’s top 2% of science researchers, according to Stanford University’s 2020 rankings. «It is as if they had been selected for Wimbledon in tennis or for the World Cup in football», he says. And with good reason: Neurips is where the most advanced results in machine learning from both academia and industry are unveiled. «This is where new AI techniques are presented, making it possible to predict diseases, forecast natural disasters, invent new medicines, drive a driverless car, and so on. It is also where new versions of ChatGPT are presented», explained Rachid Guerraoui.
The eight young talents work in some of the world’s leading laboratories (see illustration), including those at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Zurich (ETHZ) and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Économique (ENSAE, Paris).
«Reinforcement learning», «trustworthy machine learning»…
They are positioned in cutting-edge specialties, and work on cutting-edge research themes. Yassir Jerda (MIT), for example, specializes in computer science and applied mathematics (algorithms, optimization, and control systems). He graduated in engineering from Ensimag in Grenoble, with a double degree from the Royal Polytechnic School of Stockholm (KTH). And it was at KTH that he completed his PhD in reinforcement learning. Today, Yassir Jerda is a post-doc at MIT, where he is conducting research into reinforcement learning. «This type of learning is applied in many fields, such as robotics, medical treatment, and recommender systems, among others. In a few words, the aim of my research is to analyze and develop learning algorithms capable of interacting with complex environments, using as little data as possible», explained the young researcher. His ambition is to embark on a career as a teacher-researcher in the field of machine learning.
Youssef Allouah is a PhD student in computer science at EPFL. He describes himself as « a theoretician by training, at the intersection of computer science and mathematics». His field of research is «trustworthy machine learning». Here, the young doctoral engineer develops algorithms that are robust to manipulation, can be proven, and preserve the confidentiality of their users’ data. His passion is research, which he hopes to continue. In academia or industry? He hasn’t made up his mind yet.
Some of these young talents have passed through the Lydex preparatory courses in Benguerir, like Oussama Boussif, currently attached to the MILA Institute.
AI will change our lives!
How will AI evolve over the next few years? For Yassir Jedra (MIT), it is clear that AI will change our lives, both socially and in the workplace. «We’re already seeing AI-based tools like ChatGPT that have become indispensable in the day-to-day work of programmers», says the young researcher to illustrate his idea. For him, AI will also play a major role in future scientific innovations, particularly in fields such as medicine, biology, physics, and even mathematics. «We can already cite a few examples, such as Alphafold from Deepmind (a Google subsidiary), which predicts the structure of proteins from their amino acids alone, or, just recently, Alphageometry, also from DeepMind, making it possible to solve fairly complex geometry problems, at the level of the International Mathematical Olympiad», added Yassir Jedra.
For Youssef Allouah (EPFL), AI, which is attracting an increasing number of talented researchers and entrepreneurs, some of whom have branched off from their original fields, has a bright future ahead of it. Nonetheless, «there will inevitably be problems of reliability and regulation as AI is deployed on a large scale. Our research is ideally placed to support this deployment», he concluded.
Ahlam NAZIH
