While in the Republic of Congo, a workshopwas launched to accelerate the establishment of an African center for research in artificial intelligence, Algeria announces the creation and inauguration of higher schools of mathematics and artificial intelligence. For this academic year 2021-2022, the first classes will host 200 students each, according to Algerian Minister of Higher Education and Research Abdelbaqi Benziane. The two establishments will be located in the western suburbs of Algiers, within the cyberpark of Sidi Abdellah.

Two colleges: one for mathematics and the other specializing in artificial intelligence

It is within the framework of the next academic year 2021-2022 that the national graduate school of mathematics and the school of artificial intelligence will be inaugurated. Nearly 9,000 applications have been made (8,000 for the AI school and 1,000 for the mathematics graduate school) to join one of these two new higher education institutions. Despite the high demand, only 400 places (200 for each school) are available.

Last April, the President of the Republic, Abdelmadjid Tebboune had approved the creation of these two new institutions dedicated to AI and mathematics. At the time, he stressed that:

“It is important to bring together all the pedagogical and service conditions to encourage the enrollees of the two schools and grant them all the necessary incentives to develop the level of scientific learning and facilitate their professional integration later.”

A carefully selected teaching team, graduate students to be retained

Abdelbaqi Benziane then refers to the supervision of students and the carefully recruited teaching team for these two schools:

“There has been the formation of a complete team bringing together scientific expertise from different academic institutions across the country, tasked with the mission of developing training programs that can ensure an exceptional level of teaching, the capacity of supervision being set at ten students for each teacher.”

The courses will be provided in Arabic, French and English, a desire of the minister who wished to emphasize the solicitation of national skills established abroad to participate in teaching, or even training at a distance or face-to-face depending on the improvement or not of the current health conditions.

The president emphasized the mechanisms that would allow the graduates of these schools to find work in the mathematics or AI sector and avoid “the brain drain phenomenon”. He nevertheless wishes to promote exchanges of experience in the field of training with foreign partners.

Translated from Algérie : inauguration des écoles supérieures des mathématiques et de l’intelligence artificielle