National Institutes Concentrate on Developing Computer Geniuses

by Richard H. Curtiss

It will be several years before most Tunisian families have a personal computer at home. But the nation’s planners have no intention of waiting until then to develop innovative computer programmers who can not only meet Tunisia’s needs, but also develop computer software for marketing throughout the Arab world.

With both goals in mind, the Tunisian government operates two institutes. One, the Regional Institute for Informatics and Telecommunications (IRSIT, the acronym for the title in French) employs 45 full-time programmers and designers and an additional 10 to 20 part-time computer experts, some of whom also are professors at Tunisian universities.

The other, the National Center of Computing for Children, opened its doors in September 1996, with the goal of making Tunisian children as familiar with computers, their practical applications, and computer culture as their peers growing up in the most highly industrialized societies.

Dr. Salah Benabdallah, head of IRSIT’s Decision Support Systems Department, has a bachelor of science degree from Ohio State University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University in Indiana. His 11 years in the United States have made him as at home in the English language as he is in the computer culture.

He seems supremely confident taking an American visitor through the various departments of his institute, where the researchers, few of whom seem much more than 35 years of age, call him by his first name, American-style. In one room, staff members are compiling a computerized general purpose Arabic-English language dictionary containing 50,000 English entries, with tags indicating grammatical categories and other details, and more than 150,000 Arabic words.

In the same section researchers are working on still more ambitious projects, including a phrase dictionary which even contains a wide range of current idiomatic expressions and proverbs. The goal, already realized to some extent, is to provide machine-assisted translation whereby an editor can produce Arabic-language texts by scanning English-language texts, and vice versa.

Related software programs also are being developed to enable blind persons to compose a written letter or text by speaking into a computer which will convert the spoken words into written form. Conversely, computers can be programmed to scan written texts and “read” them aloud to blind users.

With the materials being developed in this section of IRSIT, texts cannot be translated automatically from one language to another, but translations can be prepared rapidly by a skilled operator using much the same techniques now in use in the United States to scan texts and store them for retrieval.

Dr. Benabdallah’s guided tour of IRSIT quickly reveals that exactly that process is taking place at IRSIT. All announcements from Tunisia’s Official Gazette since January 1988, are being scanned into an experimental interactive information system, with the cooperation of Tunisia’s government press. The system will enable lawyers, legislators, journalists or the general public to find and retrieve information they need quickly and easily.

IRSIT also developed a system for optical digit recognition of the information contained in telephone meters. Developed in cooperation with Tunisia’s General Directorate of Telecommunications, the system produces quicker and more accurate telephone bills, and at the same time stores the information in retrievable form to settle potential billing disputes.

IRSIT also carried out the introduction in 1991 and 1992 of the Internet into Tunisia through a connection in France. Tunisia thus became the first country to introduce the Internet in Africa, beating South Africa by three months. It now is possible for Tunisians to access world-wide Internet facilities. Having accomplished this mission, the government-supported IRSIT has turned over the maintenance of the access system to a private company.

On still another floor of IRSIT’s building, specialists are working on space technologies, based upon a trilateral convention between IRSIT, France’s Aerospatiale, and Arabsat. The convention facilitates the application of satellite data to agricultural, geological and marine resources, transportation networks, and other forms of planning. There even is a project to provide information on outbreaks of locust infestations and to predict the speed and direction of their migrations, based on prevailing winds. All this enables nations in the paths of such infestations to assemble the resources to combat them, and to monitor the progress of their efforts.

In all of these departments, however, the specialists are not just facilitating hookups between information sources, like space satellites, and industrial and governmental users. They also are developing software to apply such transfers of technology not only in Tunisia, but in other countries both in the Arab world and other emerging nations.

Still other projects have been undertaken at the behest of the government and private industry to assemble the information necessary to help decision makers. IRSIT projects have been applied to Tunisia’s textile industry to reduce manufacturing costs, to its transportation system to help plan for the future and to schedule necessary maintenance, and for quality control in the manufacture in Tunisia of spare parts for the auto and electronics industry. Acknowledging the preponderance of government projects in IRSIT’s work schedules, Dr. Benabdallah explains, “We still need government intervention because private industry is not yet strong.”

Although foreign-made computer components are assembled in Tunisia, they are not yet cost competitive on foreign markets. Tunisia does aim to be competitive, however, in software applications and it is in this field that IRSIT scientists concentrate their efforts.

Much of the basic research and training that led to the creation of IRSIT was underwritten by American foreign aid funds. Now Tunisia no longer receives direct USAID funding.

“When the U.S. stopped funding, we had to look elsewhere,” Dr. Benabdallah explains. What international funding IRSIT obtains now comes principally from the European Union countries. However, there also are projects with Japan and Hong Kong, both of which involve exchange of research personnel, and the U.S. National Science Foundation helps with small projects.

“Now EU funding is more important,” the U.S.-trained Benabdallah explains, “but we really miss USAID financing.” He adds with a smile that in a way U.S. and Tunisian roles have reversed. Originally many Tunisians received their advanced engineering and technical training through U.S. government-sponsored programs. The U.S. training was especially valuable to Tunisians like himself, Benabdallah says, because “English is the language of science. But now a lot of people from IRSIT are hired by U.S. companies.”

The Children’s Computing Center

The continuation of the process of preparing Tunisians for employment in both the national and international computer industry might be described as one of the long-term goals of Tunisia’s National Center of Computing for Children, directed by Dr. Hichem Mezhoud. It is housed in a specially designed building that defies normal architectural conventions by adapting the heights of windows and other facilities to the dimensions of children. Its rooms and hallways also are decorated in bright colors and assume unusual geometrical shapes to stimulate creative and unconventional thinking.

In the first week after the computing for children center opened its doors, and while training classes still were being conducted for its instructors, more than a thousand applications were received from parents, schools and even daycare centers.

The courses it gives are designed for children from 3 to 15 years old, with instruction modules varying from 12 hours for pre-school children to 20-hour modules for older students. Actual instruction time in the center is about three hours a week.

The objective of all the courses, according to Dr. Mezhoud, is to prepare children for the age of communication and information systems. The center will do that by introducing children to the culture of computer science, developing their cognitive skills, and offering a variety of training courses from routine office computer applications to computer programming and computer science for the most promising students.

Because the center was built in a new area of sports stadiums and arenas on land owned by Tunisia’s Ministry of Youth and Children, residents of nearby suburbs are particularly affluent and perhaps 40 percent already have personal computers in their homes. However, the center’s programs are being designed for children who do not have access to personal computers except in their school libraries. Therefore, in addition to hands-on instruction with the center’s computer hardware and software, it is expected that all participants will practice and experiment with the center’s computers outside of class instruction time. Such access to the computers is available daily and at no charge to all children enrolled in center programs.

There also is an on-line library as well as a CD-Rom collection from which students can select program disks for interactive perusal and experimentation. In using such facilities, explains Dr. Mezhoud, “they are trained in multi-media use.” To enlarge the selection of such materials, the center uses Power Mac computers, which are both IBM and Apple/MacIntosh compatible.

For its 12-to-15-year-old trainees, the center also plans courses for the most apt and highly motivated students to encourage their creativity. The creativity center will enable the brightest students to write their own programs in fields varying from Tunisian history to artistic creation.

“Although there are special programs for each age, the overall objective is to move the students from consumers of technology to producers,” Dr. Mezhoud explains. “They can come in groups either from schools or from daycare centers, or they may come individually if they are accompanied by parents. Our main objective is to familiarize children with computers, and we feel we can do this best by allowing them to make their own mistakes, supplying guidance when they ask and are ready for it. We expect to train more than 5,000 students per year.”

When Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali opened the $1 million center, he told its founders to begin planning centers for other areas and towns, particularly where students are less likely to have access to computers at home.

“For several years to come,” Dr. Mezhoud explains, “few Tunisian families will be able to afford a home computer. Therefore, for several years to come centers like this will be needed in order to prepare this generation of children to participate in the information age.”