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Biography

Research-driven professional with a distinctive combination of leadership, research & development, and education in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. Experience with most AI paradigms from old to newest ones. Solid publication record in top-ranked conferences and journals, and extensive teaching experience at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Wide range of R&D projects, demonstrating a proven ability to manage research teams and develop effective research programs.

With dual Canadian and Moroccan Citizenships, exposure to both Arabic-African and Western education systems and cultures. Keynote speaker as well as a visiting professor, founding president of the ALESM engineering language society as well as leading regional and international funded projects. Notably, presented a project to the Minister of Higher Education for establishing the Moroccan National Centre for AI.

Founder of an AI start-up specialized in NLP, which has developed cutting-edge multilingual NLP solutions, including social listening and automatic speech recognition.

Research interests encompass a broad spectrum of AI and data science fields, including Machine and Deep Learning, LLMs, Multi-agent systems, Cognitive systems, NLP, NLP frameworks, Linguistic Resources and ontologies, Morphology, POS Tagging, Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, Summarization, IR and QA systems, and Arabic/Dialect processing.

Education

1995-1998:        Ph.D. in Computer Science (Laval University, Canada)
                 Title: Interaction Model Based on the Agents’ Point of View
                 Key words: Artificial Intelligence, Multi-agent Systems, Negotiation, Computational Linguistics.

1992-1994:         M.S. Computer Science (Laval University, Canada)
                 Title: Representing Knowledge in Real Time Expert Systems Using Temporal Graphs: Application to a Driving System
                 Key words:Artificial Intelligence, Expert Systems, Real Time Reasoning, Temporal Reasoning .

1988-1992:         System’s Analyst (INSEA, Rabat, Morocco)
                 Title: Generalisation- Based Memory Model
                 Key words: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science.

1985-1988:        Baccalauréat in Mathematical-Sciences (Al Khawarizmy, Casablanca, Morocco).

Key Research Accomplishments

  • PI of MURABAA (SQUARE), A digital platform providing scientific knowledge, in terms of resources, lexicon and dictionaries, about the structure of the Arabic word
  • Founded the “Language Engineering and Learning Modeling (ALELM)” research group at the Mohammed 5th University in Rabat, in 2006
  • PI of SAFAR, one of the top Arabic NLP frameworks in the world
  • PI on several linguistic datasets distributed by CLARIN, ELRA and LDC
  • PI on eSemantics, a semantic and bilingual information retrieval system (As knowledge transfer for the Synto Canadian IT company)
  • PI on an automatic classification tool for administrative documents written in Arabic and French (As knowledge transfer for a Moroccan administration)
  • Co-PI of the second release of the official Arabic wordnet
  • Co-PI on Amine platform for the development of intelligent cognitive and multi-agent systems
  • Created a prototype for OCTOPUS© project using LabView

Academic Experience

Full Professor

  • EMI, Mohammed Vth University in Rabat, Morocco            2016 – Present

Assistant / Associate Professor

  • EMI, Mohammed Vth University, Rabat, Morocco                2005 – 2015
  • IERA, Mohamed Vth University, Rabat, Morocco.                 2003 – 2004
  • ENSAT Abdelmalek Saadi University, Tangier, Morocco     1999 – 2003

 Leadership

  • Support the development of new computer science programs while supervising, advising, and mentoring graduate/undergraduate students
  • Participation in university committees
  • Founding president of a language engineering society
  • Founding and leader of the AI research lab at the Mohammadia School of Engineering
  • Cultivate strong relations with students, staff, and educational administrators
  • Led wide-ranging research projects

Research

  • Led various academic and R&D projects
  • Secure research funding by composing proposals
  • Enable the organization of seminars, lectures, local and international events
  • Design various research programs in artificial intelligence, data science and multi-agent systems

Teaching

  • Long experience in teaching in the field of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science for both core and advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels
  • Ability to link research and teaching
  • Most courses ACM-IEEE computing curricula compliant
  • Active contribution to all accreditations in new curriculum in the computer science department of Mohammadia School of Engineering
  • Experience with classroom technologies for online learning and contribution to new teaching materials

Other Professional Activities

  • Co-founded AILAND as an AI start-up (ailand.ma) June 2023
  • Executive education within the Intelcia group, “Artificial Intelligence, Identification of use cases and impact in the company”, January 2023
  • Member of the governing board of the Mohammadia School of Engineers, 2021 – Present
  • Head of the “Language Engineering & Learning Modeling (ALELM)” research group, at Mohammed 5th University in Rabat, Morocco, 2006 – Present
  • Co-Founder & past-president of the Arabic Language Engineering Society in Morocco, 2012 – 2018
  • Consultant, eVision INC., Canada, 2007 – 2012
  • Computer Science Consultant for the “Progress” Project, USAID, 2001

Career Note

  • Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton – London (2024)
  • Online adjunct professor at the open institute of technology OPIT (2022 – 2024)
  • Adjunct professor at the College of Engineering & Information Technology | University of Maryland, Baltimore County UMBC, USA (2022 – 2023)
  • Associate/Full professor | Mohammed Vth University in Rabat, Rabat, Morocco (2003 – Present)
  • Adjunct professor at the school of science and engineering | Al Akhawayn University, Morocco (2002 – 2003)
  • Assistant professor | Abdelmalek Saadi University, Tangier, Morocco (1999 – 2003)
  • Head of the Computer Science Department | EDHEC, Casablanca, Morocco (1999)
  • Adjunct Lecturer at the Computer Science Department | Laval University, Canada (1997 – 1998)
  • Research Assistant | Laval University, Canada
    Professional Computer Science Specialist for the OCTOPUS© project | Laval University, Canada (1994)
  • Teaching Assistant (Computer Science Department) | Laval University, Canada (1993 – 1996)
  • End of engineering Studies Training | INSEA (National School of Statistics & Applied Economics), Rabat (1992)
  • Internship Training | Renault Véhicule Industriels, Lyon, France (1991)

R&D Funded Projects

PI

  • SAFAR: Framework Architecture For Arabic – http://arabic.emi.ac.ma/safar/
  • ASC project: Speech MSA Corpora by Moroccan and Tunisian recorders
    • Funder: Samsung Electronics Levant/Jordan (April 2016)
  • SEWAC project: Development of an Arabic ontology
    • Funder: Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization ALECSO (2012-2014)
  • eSemantics, a semantic and bilingual information retrieval system (As knowledge transfer for the Synto Canadian IT company)
    • Funder: Synto – Canada (February 2012)
  • Project ArabClassify: automatic classification tool for administrative documents written in Arabic and French (As knowledge transfer for a Moroccan administration)
    • Funder: Ministry of Finance – Morocco (February 2011)
  • Arabic Question/Answering – http://arabic.emi.ac.ma/ArabicQA/
    • Funder: Mohammed Vth University – Agdal for the project “Developing an Arabic QA system”, (September 2011)
    • Funder: Moroccan-Spanish Cooperation Commission for the project, “Arabic Question/Answering System using intelligent Agents”, (Januray 2008)
  • iLearnArabic: Arabic Learning applications – http://arabic.emi.ac.ma:8080/iLearnArabic/

Co-PI

  • MED-AI project: Exchange program between Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany and Mohammed V University in Rabat
    • Funder: DAAD – German Academic Exchange Service, (June – December 2023)
  • ASCENSION project : AI Scheme for Capturing Employment’s Newsworthy Streams, Insights, Outlooks & Needs
    • Funder: Al-Khawarizmi Research Support Program, Moroccan Ministry of Digitization (January 2021- January 2024)
  • UBSMI project: Understanding Bilingual Social Media Information
    • Funder: Moroccan-American Fulbright Award (July-October 2021)
  • Project: Using the SAFAR platform to analyze Arabic texts in the context of big data
    • Funder: University of Montreal, visiting professor at the computer science department (September 2014)
  • IAWN project: Development of the Iraki AWN
    • Funder: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania (USA), (Marsh 2012)
  • The official international Arabic Wordnet – http://globalwordnet.org/arabic-wordnet/
    • Funder: Moroccan-Spanish Cooperation Commission for the project, “Extension and enrichment of the Arabic Wordnet as an Arabic linguistic resource”, (January 2010)
  • Amine platform for the development of intelligent cognitive and multi-agent systems – http://amine-platform.sourceforge.net/