Science

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Mauritius: the past, now and the future

8 December 2022 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

On 7 December 2022, I did a presentation on “Robotique et IA à Maurice: Historique, État des lieux et Challenges” during a workshop on “Robotique Cooperative et Intelligence Artificielle” at the “Université des Mascareignes”.

I started by explaining how the sugar industry has been very forward-looking by introducing mechanised harvesting in the 1990s and how automation is pervasive today. This is something which is rarely known to the public. Then, I embarked on an exposé of Vision 2030 of the Government and the Three-Year Strategic Plan of 2017-2020 (which is still ongoing). In particular, I gave the list of the six growth sectors for Mauritius and the required enablers (including, of course, innovation).

Then, I spoke about the need to come up with Smart Citizens in order to build a Smart Mauritius. Having Smart Citizens is absolutely fundamental in order to tackle the complex issues we have today as well as elect Smart Politicians.

Because I had an audience of teachers and students, I spent some time on ways to enhance our education system in order to create more Smart Citizens. Techniques such as personalised learning could be used. Why do we all need to learn the same things and in the same way? This can make learning more enjoyable and, hence, be an important means to leave no one behind.

Furthermore, learning is not only about the young people. In our era, we all need to engage in lifelong learning. We need to find interesting and effective ways to upskill and reskill our existing working population.

I then gave an outline of the Artificial Intelligence strategy in Government from the World AI Show in 2018, to the formulation of the strategy a few months later, the decision to setup a Mauritius Artificial Intelligence Council and, subsequently, the decision to have one agency for all emerging technologies (one of which being AI).

Of course, being at the the “Université des Mascareignes”, I spoke lengthily about the excellent decision to introduce their Masters in AI and the impact this can have.

But I also shared my general feeling that things move too slowly in Mauritius. From 2018 to 2022, four years have elapsed and we should have done much more.

Focusing on important and big challenges to achieve Net Zero

30 November 2022 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

Today, I participated in a Road to Net Zero conference organized by the School of Sustainable Development and Tourism of the University of Technology, Mauritius and the University of Birmingham, UK. Themes covered during the day were climate change, renewable energy, ESG disclosure and the SDG framework.

The official opening was done by the Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development and the Minister of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation.

The keynote speaker was Associate Professor Roshan Boojihawon from the University of Birmingham in the UK. Rudy Oh-Seng, Environment Officer at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, intervened next.

My own presentation was about ways to achieve our 2030 development targets. I spoke about the existing Vision 2030 of the Republic of Mauritius, the UNDP Strategy for 2022 to 2025 and the absolute need to focus on having a skilled workforce to tackle the important and big problems facing us.

Last but not least was Mreedula Mungra, the Chief Executive Officer of the Mauritius Renewable Energy Agency (MARENA), who masterfully explained the steps to follow to achieve the vision of having 60% renewable energy within the next eight years.

In the audience were representatives of the private sector involved in sustainability, academics and students from Mauritius and abroad. The level of interaction between the audience and the speakers was excellent. Many were young professionals and young students and they are instrumental in the country acheiving its many targets.

Tomorrow, the sessions will be more technical and more focussed on ESG disclosure.

A Brief History of Programming (and my journey)

28 November 2022 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

On Wednesday 23 November, I made a one hour talk on “A Brief History of Programming” and my own journey as a programmer. It was during Developers Conference 2022.

I did not know that my talk would take place in the large amphitheatre of the Caudan Arts Centre. In some ways, this made it more of a TED-talk than a normal presentation among geeks. And, being the first talk in the morning at 9:00, there were not many people attending… But this was a blessing in disguise because it made my talk more interactive where I had the opportunity to ask questions to the people who came, many of whom I knew personally.

There are many programming languages and they can broadly be classified into programming paradigms according to the features they have. The most popular paradigms are procedural, object-oriented and functional but many others exist.

Over the years, some programming languages became more popular than others (for many reasons). It is not because people are raving about Swift, Kotlin, Go or Rust today which this means than there will not be new programming languages in the future. And this, of course, does not mean that the likes of LISP, C, Java or C# can be discarded.

One essential aspect of learning programming is that it takes time and one needs to know many different paradigms if he/she wants to be a good problem solver (as different problems need to be tackled from different perspectives). Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, put it nicely.

The point is to learn at least half a dozen different programming paradigms over 10 years.

My own journey as a programmer

My parents bought our first computer in 1988 when I was 15. I had discovered programming when I was 12-13 but, because I didn’t own a computer, I programmed “on paper”. I had a big notebook with pages and pages of algorithms in some kind of pseudocode.

Here are some slides from my presentation which basically tells my story as a programmer but also as someone who loves to try new programming languages and paradigms on a regular basis.