Maroc Hebdo had the opportunity to chat with Ali Kettani, head of the College of Computing at Mohammed-VI Polytechnic University, on the fringes of Science Week, which the university’s Benguerir campus is hosting from 17 to 23 February 2025.
This year, 2025, the College of Computing at the Universiy Mohammed-VI Polytechnique (UM6P), which serves as the university’s faculty of computer science, will deliver its first batch of students.
Launched in 2020, right in the middle of Covid, this pioneering school aims to train engineers capable of meeting increasingly advanced technical needs, both for Morocco and for the rest of Africa, as part of UM6P’s pan-African vocation. One obvious example is AI, which the UM6P College of Computing did not wait for to become fashionable with pre-trained generative transformers such as ChatGPT before taking an interest in. Machine learning, one of its best-known branches, which enables computers to learn by themselves from data and to improve with experience without being explicitly programmed, is even one of its major specialties.
The other major area of interest for UM6P’s College of Computing is cybersecurity, which, as we have seen with the recent holding of the African Cybersecurity Forum from 3 to 5 February 2025 in Rabat, sees Morocco playing a leading role on the continent. In this respect, UM6P’s College of Computing will have its own dedicated faculty in Rabat from the 2025-2026 academic year.
Turnkey solutions
But in addition to developing local talent in the most complex areas of computing, the UM6P College of Computing also dreams of seeing its students make a practical contribution to meeting the challenges currently facing the industry by going straight to the drawing board, in other words by offering turnkey solutions that they themselves have conceptualized and that they would propose to public and private bodies as part of entrepreneurial projects. This, at least, is the avowed ambition of Ali Kettani, Director of the College of Computing at UM6P, with whom Maroc Hebdo had the pleasure of chatting on the sidelines of Science Week, which the university’s Benguerir campus is hosting from 17 to 23 February 2025.
On Tuesday, 18 February 2025, Science Week gave many students from UM6P’s College of Computing the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a professional panel of judges, under the supervision of Ali Kettani. There are exactly thirteen of them, and all have benefited from prior coaching, the ultimate aim of which is, of course, to be able to put their ideas into practice—in other words, to set up a start-up with a well-developed product.
‘We draw a great deal of inspiration from what is done in the United States, for example at Stanford University in California, where theoretical research, which is obviously fundamental, is given pride of place alongside applied research, for purposes related to the concrete, day-to-day needs of people’, explains Ali Kettani.
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