Avinash Meetoo

Let us build a Smart Mauritius

Mauritian geeks, let’s unite against COVID-19

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Now that the coronavirus has become reality in Mauritius and new cases of the COVID-19 disease are being found every day, it is time for us, geeks of Mauritius, to unite.

We, computer scientists, software engineers, makers, scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, etc. have an important role to play together with all the other professionals who are already working hard on finding solutions.

I am proposing that, should you have an idea or have developed a web app or a mobile app, that you believe could be useful in this difficult period to send me all the details, ideally in the form of a document (PDF or otherwise), of what you have done. My contact details are in my CV (most notably my email address which is )

I’ll then do my best to forward what you have sent me to the most appropriate people in Government.

For discussion among ourselves, may I propose the Mauritius channel on Reddit?

Computer and Information Security are key to the Digital Transformation of Mauritius

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On Thursday 16 January 2020, I did a presentation on the “Privacy Aspects of ICT Projects” during a conference organised by the Data Protection Office of the Ministry of Technology, Communication and Innovation. A few days prior to the conference, while I was reflecting on what I was going to say, I had an intuition: Mauritius will have to undergo a profound digital transformation at all levels: government, companies, schools and individuals, if we want to attain Vision 2030.

This is why I decided to start my presentation by explaining to the audience what Vision 2030 means. I am always quite amazed, during the various talks I make, that only a few people know about this vision of the Government which was first mentioned by the then Prime Minister on 22 August 2015. Today, Vision 2030, which is about making Mauritius an inclusive high-income country well before 2030, is what dictates the various strategies and actions being done by Government.

For me, the best way to be a high-income country and thus reach the status of Smart Mauritius is by our business entities, the conglomerates but also the SMEs including startups, getting more revenue. Given the limited size of the Mauritian market, this needs to be done through the development of new products and new services for new markets (especially the African market). This is why Government is investing massively in Smart Infrastructure, Smart Mobility and Smart Education, etc.

Now, to create new products and new services (in any field) and conquer new markets, one has to use technology to the full whether one requires a tried-and-trusted technology like Linux or the latest fashionable thing such as Artificial Intelligence.

A lot of organisations have realised that technology in 2020 is about software. Software is eating the world after all. Our organisation, be it in Government or our companies, will have to either implement or develop software. It’s no wonder that 2/3 of the job offers on the LinkedIn website in 2018 were for software engineers (15% for IT people and 15% for data science people).

Now, the software needs to be trusted by all users, especially the ones giving their personal data. Therefore, making sure that the software respects the requirement of the Mauritian Data Protection Act or the European General Data Protection Regulations is key for the organisation to be trusted. Privacy has become so important that an organisation which acquires a reputation of not protecting the data of its clients or users is essentially moribund…

How can we implement or develop software which collects and processes personal data (as provided by users and clients) and which offers all guarantees that the privacy of the individual is going to be protected? This is quite a challenge and two technical avenues can be explored: computer security and information security.

Computer security is about the hardware and software aspects: making sure that the principle of security by design is followed from the very beginning (i.e. users only have to have access to the subset of data which they really require and this can be done through the principle of least privilege and proper access control). Then, security measures such as two-factor authentication, encryption, firewalls and intrusion detection mechanisms can be used to secure the infrastructure further. I am quite confident that using something like the Linux operating system for deployment is a great idea (ask Google, Amazon and Facebook!). Interestingly, the last time I used Windows for anything serious was around 2006, 14 years ago. Since then, I’ve been on Linux and macOS and I’m very happy. Of course, it is also important to train users to identify threats and to respond correctly when there is an incident.

I then spoke about information security which, interestingly, is more about the most vulnerable point in IT, the human. The best way to protect the information within an organisation is through the establishment of a good security policy (which needs to be fully understood and followed to the letter by all). It is also important to have physical security for the people and the equipment. This can be a challenge because people move. Laptops and smartphones today contain valuable information, and being so easy to steal, it is important to have a proper asset management system for business continuity. Of course, data needs to be protected (backups, mirroring, etc.) as well as the network.

Underlying everything is making sure that all layers, including all software, respect the requirements of laws such as our own Data Protection Act which mandates that users giving their data can also modify or erase the data afterwards. The law also mandates that the user be informed whenever his data is being collected so that he can give his consent or not. This is quite a challenge from a software development point of view.

Adhering to everything in computer security and in information security is quite difficult, costly and can be a lengthy process. But the reward is more trust and this is only way to get more business and, hence, more income and profit.

As I had been given 20 minutes for the presentation, I could not go into details in everything. I was telling a friend, after the presentation, that, if I was still at Knowledge Seven, I would have maybe created a 30 hour long training on this important topic.

By the way, I didn’t reinvent the wheel. A lot of my presentation was based on what I read online, most notably on Wikipedia which I love.

Thanks to everyone who came to the presentation and I hope you learned a few things. I definitely did while preparing it and doing it. Thanks to @yurit0s for the photo where I am visible.

The Digital Economy: Challenges and Opportunities in Research for Mauritius

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Last week, I was invited to give a presentation on La question du Numérique: Enjeux, défis et perspectives de la recherche pour le dévéloppement socio-économique de Maurice during the Assises de la Recherche organised by l’Université des Mascareignes.

For all the non-French speaking readers of this blog, I meant to say that I was invited to give a speech on The Digital Economy: Challenges and Opportunities in Research for the Socio-Economic Development of Mauritius. This was during the Research Week organised by the University of Mascareignes, one of the four public universities in Mauritius, notable for its affiliations with French universities and for the use of French as the medium of instruction.

I started my presentation with Vision 2030 of the Government which is about transforming Mauritius into an high-income and inclusive country well before 2030. For this vision to become true, a number of growth enablers have been identified:

They are having good infrastructure (Internet, roads, buildings, hospitals, etc.), having good education (the 9-year schooling reforms, free education for undergraduate students in public universities and polytechnics, etc.), good governance, economic integration (or, else, one can forget about inclusiveness…) and, of course, innovation.

We are fortunate to (more or less) have the first four in Mauritius. Concerning innovation, we still have some work to do but things are moving in the right direction thanks to the contribution of startups, incubators and some of the private companies which exist.

Interestingly, Vision 2030 also speaks of six growth sectors, namely: agriculture (sustainable, eco-friendly…), the ocean economy (for food security and tourism), tourism (new products, new markets, new airline routes…), manufacturing (high-tech, new markets…), financial services (regulations, international…) and ICT services (export, skills development, new products…)

At this point, I asked a question to the audience: how many of them were aware of this strategic plan for Mauritius, namely Vision 2030? Only a handful were and I told them that there are two culprits: us (for not having marketed the document properly) and them (for not being curious). Interestingly, we all agreed that this was not very good, hence my focus on writing a few posts on this blog referring to Vision 2030 and giving links to the official documents…

I then talked about the research perspectives. I told them to, first of all, form multidisciplinary teams of researchers and students, identify an important problem in one of the growth sectors, make sure that the problem is a big one instead of being a trivial one and work hard on solving the problem!

Easier said than done obviously. But much needed if we want to transform the country.

I then spent a few minutes talking about essential emerging technologies that they could use to solve the problems identified. I focused on Internet of Things (to collect data with sensors), on databases and blockchains to store data (the latter being for data which should not be tampered with), on analytics (which I like to call statistics) to infer things and on Deep Learning, once again to infer things, but only when the data is too big or too unstructured.

The interesting thing is that a lot of people told me afterwards that I had made this part really easy to understand for them. I’m happy about that.

At the end, I told them a big thank you and that their contribution counts in making the Republic of Mauritius (which includes Rodrigues, Saint Brandon and Agaléga) a better place.