Plenary Speakers

S1: Informatization and iconomy
S2: A Socio-Technical Approach to International Cyber-Security
S3: Smart Cities Technologies, Opportunities and Challenges
S4: Generative-Discriminative Based Methods for Arabic Recognition
S5: To ally Data and Narration in Analytics for radically improved Decision Process
S6: Frugal Social Sustainable Casablanca Smart City: new concept to promote socio economic growth and equity in emerging countries

Informatization and iconomy Michel Volle, Institut de l’Iconomie, France

[Abstract] From 1975 onwards the technical system, previously built on the synergy of mechanics, chemistry and energy, was supplanted by a technical system that is dominated by the synergy of electronics, software and the Internet. The institutions, especially businesses, are then entered a transitional phase: their organization is destabilized, their mission is reformulated.

The current economic crisis is due to the inadequate behavior of institutions, consumers and States to the "new nature" that informatization let emerge.

To get out of a crisis, you have to know where to go. We must therefore steer the strategy, taking as reference the model of a society and an economy which are by assumption mature and therefore, as economists say, efficient.

We call this model iconomy. It shows the necessary conditions of efficiency: a society that does not respect them can not reach the efficiency in the new technical system.

Here are its main results:
 repetitive tasks being automated, the marginal cost of products is negligible;
 the iconomy being capital-intensive, the risk of the entrepreneur is maximized;
 informatization giving arms to predators, the law and the judicial system must contain the predation;
 the cost function being increasing returns, the market obeys the regime of monopolistic competition;
 each product is diversified in varieties that differ in their qualitative attributes and respond each to a segment of needs;
 each product is a package of goods and services, developed by a partnership;
 the intensity of innovation depends on the regulation of the duration of a temporary monopoly;
 employment lies mainly in the design of products and the engineering of their production, and in the services the product includes: manual work is replaced by mental work;
 service jobs, in particular, require discernment and a high relational competence;
 the hierarchical organization has been replaced by a collaborative organization that practices the trade of consideration;
 the secret of effectiveness is the quality of the relationship between the mental work and the ubiquitous programmable automaton where lies the computing resource.

In total, the iconomy is an economy of quality, competence and risk.

This model illuminates the present situation:
 the essential phenomenon is the informatization of the productive system and not the use of smart phones, social networks etc. to which attention is focused;
 “intelligence” is not “artificial”: it doesn't lay in programs, but in the minds of programmers and the action of producers;
 the main dangers are not "too much information kills information" nor "automation kills jobs": to the economy of competence corresponds a middle class society;
 the main danger is that of a return to feudalism: predation could destroy the rule of law and democracy.

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A Socio-Technical Approach to International Cyber-Security Ghita Mezzour, International University of Rabat, Morocco

[Abstract] Studying international aspects of cyber security requires taking into account both technical and social dimensions. However, the majority of cyber security research has only focused on the technical dimension. In my work, I study international cyber-security using a socio-technical approach that combines data science techniques, computational models, and network science techniques.
I will start by presenting my work on empirically identifying factors behind international variation in cyber-attack exposure and hosting. I use data from 10 million computers worldwide provided by a key anti-virus vendor. The results of this work indicate that reducing attack exposure and hosting in the most affected countries requires addressing both social and technical issues such as corruption and computer piracy. Then, I will present a computational methodology to assess countries’ cyber warfare capabilities. The methodology captures political factors that motivate countries to develop these capabilities and technical factors that enable such development. Together, these projects show that bridging the social and technical dimensions of cyber security can improve our understanding of the dynamics of international cyber security and have a real-world impact.

[Biography] Ghita Mezzour is an Assistant Professor at the International University of Rabat. She received her Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the United States in May 2015. At CMU, she was part of both the School of Computer Science and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Her research interests are at the intersection of cyber security, big data, and socio-technical systems. She holds a Master and a Bachelor in Communication Systems from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Smart Cities Technologies, Opportunities and Challenges Mohamed Essaaidi, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

[Abstract] Many cities around the world are currently transitioning towards Smart Cities to attain several key objectives such as a low carbon environment, high quality of living, and resource efficient economy. Urban performance depends not only on the city's endowment of hard infrastructure, but also on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure. There is a growing importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), social and environmental capital in profiling the competitiveness of cities. Information and communication technologies play a critical role in building smart cities and supporting comprehensive urban information systems. This brings together citizens and integrates technologies and services such as transportation, broadband communications, buildings, healthcare, and other utilities. Advanced communication and computing techniques can facilitate a participatory approach for achieving integrated solutions and creating novel applications to improve urban life and build a sustainable society

Extensive research is taking place on a wide range of enabling information and communication technologies, including cloud, network infrastructure, wireless and sensing technologies, mobile crowdsourcing, social networking, and big data analytics.

The main purpose of this keynote talk is to present an overview about Smart Cities technologies, applications, opportunities and research challenges.

[Biography] .

Generative-Discriminative Based Methods for Arabic Recognition Abdel Belaid, Unversité de Lorraine, France

[Abstract] The recognition of handwriting by computer remains a challenging task. Despite the impressive progress achieved during the last few decades and the increasing power of the computers, the performances of the automatic systems remains still far from the human capabilities. In this talk, we describe our experience combining two different paradigms in machine learning: generative and discriminative learning for the effective recognition of Arabic handwriting. Two main examples were considered to illustrate the feasibility of these approaches on writing recognition.  In generative methods, starting with Hidden Markov Models (HMM) with order 1 and 2, we progressively extended HMM to the plane by proposing a planar-HMM. Faced to their dimensionality limit, we experimented Dynamic Bayesian Networks. Then, to combine the advantages of the dimensionality and the temporality of the models, we proposed a new approach which integrates causal Markov Random Field in two dimensional modeling and HMMs. The word image is viewed as a random field realization which at its turn is considered to be an observation sequence of pixel columns. We then showed different applications of this model, first for analytical recognition, second for syntactic analysis by incorporating structural information as implant.  In discriminative methods, Neural Networks were the basis of the research. Based on a cognitive model, we proposed a transparent neural network where the learning is replaced by an activation process considering the nodes neighborhood. This model was extended for the recognition of decomposable words in large vocabulary context.

[Biography] Abdel Belaïd received his Ph.D degree in Computer Science in 1979 and his D.Sc. in 1987 from the University Henri Poincaré Nancy I, France. After a few years as Assistant Professor, he joined the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a Research Scientist in 1984. In 2002, he became full Professor in Unversité de Lorraine and responsible of the Cognitive Science Master. He leads since 1992 a research group at the LORIA (http://read.loria.fr/) working on Document Analysis and Text Recognition. His areas of research include Image Processing, Pattern Recognition, Document Analysis and Handwriting Recognition where he has authored over 150 articles which have been published in international journals and conferences. He is the co-author of a book, Pattern Recognition: Methods and Applications, and of many book chapters. He has developed retro-conversion techniques for document structure recognition using multi-agent systems, reasoning based cases, emergent architectures and part of speech tagging. For text printed, he developed several systems based on Neural classifiers and a on a combination of OCR and ICR techniques. He developed handwriting recognition systems based on stochastic modelling, for linear and bi-dimensional representations. Abdel Belaïd has a wide national and international visibility as he acts in several program committees and editorial boards such as International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, Pattern Recognition, Pattern Recognition Letters, IEEE PAMI, ICDAR where he is PC co-chair, etc. He has several collaborations with several universities and high schools (IUF Fribourg – Switzerland, ENIT, ESSTT – Tunisia, PUC in Brasil, ISI – Calcutta India, ETS – Montréal),   and industrial companies (Xerox France, ITESFOT, A2iA, Berger-Levrault, Jouve, La Poste, Universalis, etc.) with whom he developed several systems. He belongs to several scientific committees.

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To ally Data and Narration in Analytics for radically improved Decision Process Thierry Moniquet

[Abstract] With the Big Data and the Cloud Computing, a new area of development is growing very rapidly.  New names are arousing for designating this new strand of creation and expertise : "story data", "narrative data", "narrative visualization data", etc....   Behind these expressions, a new corpus of expertise and know-how is under way of consolidation.
As Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer,  noted in their article " Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data", on vis.standford.edu (Stanford visualization group) , "Crafting successful “datastories”  requires a diverse set of skills. Gershon and Page [12] note that effective story-telling “require[s] skills like those familiar to movie directors, beyond a technical expert’s knowledge of computer engineering and science.” While techniques from oration, prose, comic books, video games, and film production are applicable to narrative visualization, we should also expect this
emerging medium to possess unique attributes. Data stories differ in important ways from traditional storytelling. Stories in text and film typically present a set of events in a tightly controlled progression. While tours through visualized data similarly can be organized in a linear sequence, they can also be interactive, inviting verification, new questions, and alternative explanations."
Storytelling is already a technique largely used in public relations, marketing for creating a brand culture and image. In strategy analysis, it constitutes a complementary method for analysing situations and organisations. Emotional Intelligence mobilised through the conception of a storytelling and Logical Intelligence based on data analytics can be combined to achieve the most accurate level of analyse. But the revolution of Big Data and Cloud modifies radically the interaction between the two intelligences. Big Data and Cloud Computing are expanding datas we can collect, analyse and interpret about any realities. It  permit us to develop the knowledge and understanding of realities and situations at so high levels that havd never reached before. But, in the same time, it reveals an even more complexity of these ones and the importance of the emotional intelligence along the logical one in the process of knowledge creation. 
That's what Kris Hammond, Ph.D. from Yale, co-founder and chief scientist at Narrative Science and professor of computer science at Northwestern University, Founder the University of Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory expressed succinctely as follows :  "People have a hard time understanding data. That’s why data scientists and analysts are often asked to convert their findings into narrative reports. People with interpretive skills are turning that data into the thing that most of us easily understand: narratives explaining what is going on in the world based on evidence provided by the data. Likewise, the data associated with us as individuals, including the wealth of data from the emerging Internet of Things will be transformed into reports that real people will be able to read and understand. Rather than seeing data, they will see stories of their own lives mapped out for them based on artificial intelligence language systems looking at their data and explaining it to them. Data associated with their homes, cars, health, exercise, and fitness will become the clear, clean narratives that will be the stories of their lives.  The days of thinking of data as the end game are over. We now are entering the era of the narrative – narratives generated by systems that understand data, narratives that give us information to support the decisions we need to make about tomorrow.  Data will always be important, but the story of that data is the last mile." (In "The end of Big Data : AI and The Rise of  Narrative", March 6 2015, www.datainformed.com)
The "story of the data" is not only a neccessity to make understandable the significance of a data for "real people".  It offers new dramatic creative perpectives.    Big Data is indeed an extraordinary opportunity to enlarge and renew traditional narrative techniques like storytelling and their applications. As Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate, Google explains : "Marketers are responsible for messaging; as such, they'€™re often the bridge between the data and those who need to learn something from it, or make decisions based on its analysis. By rethinking the way we use data and understanding our audience, we can create meaningful stories that influence and engage the audience on both an emotional and logical level." 

[Biography] Graduated MsC in social and economics science and MsC Territotial Development, Thierry Moniquet has developed his professional expertises in Institutional Communication, Public Affairs and Strategic Intelligence.  He has coordinated European projects and networks in EU programmes. For instance, he has developed inter-cluster networks in ASD (Aeronautics Space Defense) industry. He intervened as expert in international missions for industrial clusters set-up like in Russia. He advised governmental bodies to implement international programme management units like in Balkans.  He carried out missions as scientific advisor for Institut des Hautes Etudes pour la Science et la Technologie  - IHEST - du Ministère français de la Recherche : he organised European high level seminars for IHEST’s auditors on the topics of innovation systems in Europe.  He acquired therefore specific expertises in the matter of Innovation, Governance and Clusters. 
More recently, he has anchored its expertises in Moroccon market.  Since 2011 he has succeeded to conceive and create a cluster labelised by the Moroccon government : MENARA cluster in Marrakech specialised in upper scale and luxe agrofood and cosmetics products. He is coaching start-ups and entrepreneurs in helping them to optimize strategic communication in order to create industrial and financial partnerships, to organise the foundations of their marketing strategy and to adopt an economic and business diplomacy . He coached the creation of a professional association, the Federation of the Moroccon Snail supply chain.

Along this experience, Thierry Moniquet has build his capacity as a methodologist. Communication is at the core of the methodological frameworks he developed in the context of his missions. In particular, storytelling, narrative and design thinking techniques are central to his works and his methods of intervention.  For instance, storytelling is used as an important tool of Strategy Analyze, as well as for in partnership's and network's management or Branding (brand culture).  With young Moroccon designers, he develops research about Smart Cities and visualization techniques. In this context, narrative data, narrative visualization data are becoming top priority topics in his research and studies. More generally these conceptual and methodological developments led him to work on experimental methodologies in education and pedagogical engineering. 

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Frugal Social Sustainable Casablanca Smart City: new concept to promote socio economic growth and equity in emerging countries Aawatif HAYAR, University Hassan II Casablanca, Morocco

[Abstract] Casablanca was recently selected, with Kansas City USA, by IEEE Smart City Initiative to engage as IEEE Core Smart Cities. The two cities were selected from more than 15 applicants as the cities that provided the most compelling evidence they are well positioned to utilize the resources offered through the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative and by demonstrating plans to invest human and financial capital into their project. The social frugal smart city concept we are adopting in Casablanca puts citizens at the center of the transformation process, creating a public-private-people partnership where citizens are actors in and builders of their smart city. It aims to reconcile citizens with their « City » and society making them feel that they count in « the city transformation process».  It is a frugal approach based on the use of existing or new implemented infrastructure including mobiquitous devices, such as smartphones, to develop IT driven innovation cycle and e-services that track and answer citizens economic cultural, social and ecological needs. This participatory oriented social innovation approach will allow, step by step, to build a set of interconnected pilot projects and sites to set up gradually a sustainable smart city collaborative innovation ecosystem creating at the end a social sustainable economy which turns societal and economic challenges into a business opportunities. 

[Biography] Dr. Aawatif HAYAR received, with honors, as the First Moroccan, the degree of “Agrégation Génie Electrique” from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in 1992. She received the “Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies” in Signal processing Image and Communications and the degree of Engineer in Telecommunications Systems and Networks from ENSEEIHT de Toulouse in 1997. She received with honors the Ph.D. degree in Signal Processing and Telecommunications from Institut National Polytechnique in Toulouse in 2001. She was research and teaching associate at EURECOM’s Mobile Communication Department from 2001 to 2010 in Sophia Antipolis-France. Aawatif Hayar has an HDR (Habilitation à Diriger la Recherche) from University Sud Toulon Var from France on Cognitive Wideband Wireless Systems on 2010 and an HDR on Green Téléommunication from University Hassan II Casablanca on 2013. She created in 2010 with the support of University Hassan II Casablanca the Research Centre GreenTIC. She is currently with this R&D Organization (Morocco) as General Secretary and expert in cognitive green ICT field and Smart Cities. She has also joined in 2011 the engineering school ENSEM at the University Hassan II Casablanca in Morocco where she is in charge of wireless communication cursus and leading a young researchers team for the development of an integrated wireless/wired networks based supervision platform for smart grids. She is also collaborating with Mundiapolis University Casablanca to set-up a cursus on mobile applications and advanced telecommunication networks topics. Aawatif Hayar is also member of Casablanca “Avant-garde” City think-tank. She is co-initiator since 2013 of e-madina initiative which aims at developing and promoting new Sustainable Social Smart city model for Morocco. Her research interests includes fields such as cognitive green communications systems, UWB systems, smart grids, smart cities, ICT for social eco-friendly smart socio-economic development. Aawatif Hayar was a Guest Editor of Elsevier Phycom Journal Special issue on Cognitive Radio Algorithms and System Design in 2009 and General Co-chair of Crowncom2010 (France) dedicated to cognitive radio systems and IW2GN2011 (First Green IT Day in Morocco with MNC Cluster) dedicated to wireless green systems. She was co-organizer of GDR-ISIS Cognitive Radio workshop in France in 2011. She is also IEEE DLT Chair for EMEA region since 2014. Aawatif Hayar was also General co-chair of ICT 2013 Conference (Morocco), Awards Chair for ICUWB2014 conference and Technical Program Committee co-chair for Next-Gwin Workshop in 2014 (France) where she gave the first talk on Sustainable Social Smart City Concept for emerging countries. She is also expert at the European Commission level for cognitive and UWB systems. Aawatif Hayar received with one of her PhD students the "best student paper" award at CogArt2010 and has a patent in cognitive radio field on “Process for sensing vacant bands over the spectrum bandwidth and apparatus for performing the same based on sub space and distributions analysis”. She was also selected by the prestigious African Innovation Foundation as one of the top ten innovative African womens in 2015. Aawatif Hayar is currently leading or involved in a couple of R&D projects with CNRST, Lydec, GIZ and Heinrich Böll Stiftung Foundation on Social Smart grids and Smart Home Living Labs. She is also developing and promoting with Prof. Serge Miranda, from University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in France, the MASLOW (Mobiquitous Authentic Sustainable Low Cost smart home) concept. Aawatif HAYAR was also environment activist with the association “Il était une fois la terre” in France dedicated to eco-citizenship education and sensitization from 2004 till 2009. Currently Pr. Aawatif Hayar is currently leading the IEEE Smart city initiative project in Casablanca.

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