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Awal -- Community-Powered Language Technology for Tamazight

Öktem, Alp, Boudichat, Farida

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents Awal, a community-powered initiative for developing language technology resources for Tamazight. We provide a comprehensive review of the NLP landscape for Tamazight, examining recent progress in computational resources, and the emergence of community-driven approaches to address persistent data scarcity. Launched in 2024, awaldigital.org platform addresses the underrepresentation of Tamazight in digital spaces through a collaborative platform enabling speakers to contribute translation and voice data. We analyze 18 months of community engagement, revealing significant barriers to participation including limited confidence in written Tamazight and ongoing standardization challenges. Despite widespread positive reception, actual data contribution remained concentrated among linguists and activists. The modest scale of community contributions -- 6,421 translation pairs and 3 hours of speech data -- highlights the limitations of applying standard crowdsourcing approaches to languages with complex sociolinguistic contexts. We are working on improved open-source MT models using the collected data.


Morocco's Golden Era

Al Jazeera

Game Theory: Is Moroccan football in its Golden Era? For decades, football's talent pipeline has flowed from Africa to Europe. But Morocco is reversing that trend. Samantha Johnson looks at how Morocco's football ecosystem can challenge football's traditional hierarchy. What's behind bans on away fans?


Trump's landmark deal is the real key to peace in the Middle East

FOX News

Former Israeli Amb. to the U.S. Michael Oren discusses Iran's nuclear capabilities and negotiations with Hamas to release more hostages on'Fox Report.' The idea that Middle East peace cannot and should not advance without a formal agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is outdated and demonstrably untrue. Indeed, it has done little but exacerbate conflict over the last 30 years and undermine U.S. interests in the region. They provide a new paradigm for peace between Israel and all of its neighbors, including the Palestinians. President Donald Trump obviously deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for breaking with the failed Oslo peace process paradigm still sanctified by legacy media and a bipartisan community of foreign policy elites, and for building new bridges of mutually-beneficial cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors.


Advanced Wildfire Prediction in Morocco: Developing a Deep Learning Dataset from Multisource Observations

Jadouli, Ayoub, Amrani, Chaker El

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Wildfires pose significant threats to ecosystems, economies, and communities worldwide, necessitating advanced predictive methods for effective mitigation. This study introduces a novel and comprehensive dataset specifically designed for wildfire prediction in Morocco, addressing its unique geographical and climatic challenges. By integrating satellite observations and ground station data, we compile essential environmental indicators such as vegetation health (NDVI), population density, soil moisture levels, and meteorological data aimed at predicting next-day wildfire occurrences with high accuracy. Our methodology incorporates state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning algorithms, demonstrating superior performance in capturing wildfire dynamics compared to traditional models. Preliminary results show that models using this dataset achieve an accuracy of up to 90%, significantly improving prediction capabilities. The public availability of this dataset fosters scientific collaboration, aiming to refine predictive models and develop innovative wildfire management strategies. Our work not only advances the technical field of dataset creation but also emphasizes the necessity for localized research in underrepresented regions, providing a scalable model for other areas facing similar environmental challenges.


Earthquake survivors search for loved ones in Morocco's Atlas Mountains

Al Jazeera

Tnirte, Morocco – Abdel Abed is watching the other villagers digging. When one of them gets tired, he scrambles down and takes over. It has been five days since the magnitude 6.8 earthquake ripped through the mountainous regions around Marrakesh, Morocco, and Abed's daughter, nine-year-old Shaima, is still buried under the rocks. Abed still hopes she may be alive, a family member explains, and he works with almost robotic energy as excavation efforts continue in Tnirte in the High Atlas Mountains. His wife was pulled dead from the rocks yesterday.


World Cup predictions: How many games did our AI get right?

Al Jazeera

World Cup 2022 produced incredible football. At the start of the tournament, Al Jazeera introduced Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, to crunch the numbers and predict the results of each game. After every day of action, Kashef downloaded the day's data and compared it with more than 200 metrics, including the number of wins, goals scored and FIFA rankings, from matches played over the past century, totalling more than 100,000 records, to see who was most likely to win the following day. The group stages from November 20 to December 2 were not very kind to Kashef, who erred on the side of caution and failed to foresee any of the many major upsets. The good news for us sentient beings is that every time Kashef got it wrong, we were treated to a feast of World Cup magic, including Saudi Arabia's stunning 2-1 victory over Argentina, Morocco's 2-0 defeat of Belgium and Tunisia's 1-0 win over 2018 champions France.


Spain vs Morocco round-of-16 predictions: World Cup 2022

Al Jazeera

Spain take on Morocco in the round-of-16 match at the World Cup 2022 on Tuesday. Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, has analysed more than 200 metrics, including the number of wins, goals scored and FIFA rankings, from matches played over the past century to see who is most likely to win. Prediction: Spain head into today's clash with the Atlas Lions as strong favourites but will nevertheless need to produce a much-improved performance from the defeat to Japan in their last outing. Morocco, the last remaining Arab team, is yet to lose a match during the tournament and finished top of Group F ahead of Croatia and Belgium. Looking at all the data, Kashef predicts a 69 percent chance that the 2010 World Cup winners Spain will win and take on Portugal in the quarter-finals on December 10.


Explainable AI for tailored electricity consumption feedback -- an experimental evaluation of visualizations

Wastensteiner, Jacqueline, Weiss, Tobias M., Haag, Felix, Hopf, Konstantin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning (ML) methods can effectively analyse data, recognize patterns in them, and make high-quality predictions. Good predictions usually come along with "black-box" models that are unable to present the detected patterns in a human-readable way. Technical developments recently led to eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques that aim to open such black-boxes and enable humans to gain new insights from detected patterns. We investigated the application of XAI in an area where specific insights can have a significant effect on consumer behaviour, namely electricity use. Knowing that specific feedback on individuals' electricity consumption triggers resource conservation, we created five visualizations with ML and XAI methods from electricity consumption time series for highly personalized feedback, considering existing domain-specific design knowledge. Our experimental evaluation with 152 participants showed that humans can assimilate the pattern displayed by XAI visualizations, but such visualizations should follow known visualization patterns to be well-understood by users.


Huawei launches its new Huawei nova 9 in Morocco - Morocco Latest News

#artificialintelligence

Huawei Consumer Business Group (BG) has announced the launch of Huawei nova 9 in Morocco, the ideal smartphone for the younger generation. "Incorporating a very rich set of innovative features and adorning itself with cutting-edge design elements, the latest addition to the nova series benefits from the presence of a very powerful camera system and receives all-new endowments that create new possibilities for users," according to Huawei. The Huawei nova 9 has a very powerful photographic device, reinforced by the presence of RYYB (CFA) color filters and an XD fusion engine, Huawei points out. The hardware-software integrated camera solution allows users to capture simply amazing images and videos even when light is lacking, Huawei says, noting that photos and videos will always be ready to be shared on devices. The smartphone also receives a magnificent 120 Hz curved screen, in addition to a very powerful processor and a very long battery life rechargeable through the 66 W Huawei SuperCharge1 system.


Artificial Intelligence for the benefit of Morocco's Agriculture

#artificialintelligence

Morocco's permanent representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Omar Hilale, highlighted on September 30 that agricultural sciences and new technologies are an important part of the country's new economic projections. Morocco's Green Plan reached a goal of strengthening localized irrigation, one of the three major components of its Irrigation Strategy. The high-level meeting addressed "the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in achieving post-Covid food security." "Today, these sciences and technologies are helping to increase the production of small and medium farmers," Ambassador Hilale emphasized during the meeting. He also explained the crucial role that AI plays in "helping to produce more food with less water and energy."