First High School in Morocco to Teach Moroccan History in English

09.16.2019

The Al Akhawayn School of Ifrane (ASI) is offering a new, year-long course on Moroccan History in Grade 11 as part of its Social Studies curriculum.  Although the concept of teaching Moroccan History in ASI’s high school was first introduced in 2013, it was only done in combination with World History courses. This academic year is the first time it will be taught in one consolidated course, making it the first of its kind in any school in Morocco that uses English as its primary language of instruction.

This course offers the large Moroccan student-body at ASI the opportunity to gain a better understanding of their identities in an increasingly globalized world. Through the course, ASI also seeks to equip its foreign students with deeper insight into the country where they live. The course spans over 3,000 years of Morocco’s past – starting with the pre-Islamic Era from Phoenicians, Romans, and Vandals until the Muslim Conquest by the Umayyad dynasty in the seventh century.  The course goes on to analyze Muslim dynasties by tracing the changes that occurred over time up until European Colonialism, followed by Moroccan independence and the modern era.

Nationally, the majority of international schools that are comparable to ASI teach British or American histories instead of Moroccan history. The unique status of ASI as a primarily Moroccan school that employs a North-American pedagogy enables for the flexibility of teaching local histories, while also meeting required international standards.

ASI thanks Ms. Hiam El Hiliali for her pivotal role in realizing this achievement.

AUI Faculty and SEM Students Participate in a Training on Smart Grid at the University of Newcastle

09.11.2019

Dr. Ahmed Khallaayoun and Mr. Rachid Lghoul, along with two graduate students enrolled in the AUI Sustainable Energy Management program, are attending a two-week training on the latest developments of Smart Grids. The program is part of an EU Erasmus + Project called AT-SGIRES – Advanced Teaching and training on Smart Grid & Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Systems – and is held Sep. 2-13, 2019. The training focuses on the current and future challenges grid stakeholders face with the increased integration of intermittent Renewable Energy Resources (RES) and electric vehicles.  The training coincided with the UK Energy Storage Conference, which the AUI team also attended. The conference topic primarily focused on how energy storage can provide solutions to many of the challenges facing the future electric grid. 

For more information about the AT-SGIRES project, please visit the project’s official website: meu.edu.jo/sites/atsgires/

Iraqi Publishes in Security and Communication Networks Journal

09.06.2019

Mr. Omar Iraqi, Computer Science faculty at the School of Science and Engineering recently published an article titled "Application-Level Unsupervised Outlier-Based Intrusion Detection and Prevention" in Security and Communication Networks Journal:

Abstract:

As cyber threats are permanently jeopardizing individuals’ privacy and organizations’ security, there have been several efforts to empower software applications with built-in immunity. In this paper, we present our approach to immune applications through application-level, unsupervised, outlier-based intrusion detection and prevention. Our framework allows tracking application domain objects all along the processing lifecycle. It also leverages the application business context and learns from production data, without creating any training burden on the application owner. Moreover, as our framework uses runtime application instrumentation, it incurs no additional cost on the application provider. We build a fine-grained and rich-feature application behavioral model that gets down to the method level and its invocation context. We define features to be independent from the variable structure of method invocation parameters and returned values, while preserving security-relevant information. We implemented our framework in a Java environment and evaluated it on a widely-used, enterprise-grade, and open-source ERP. We tested several unsupervised outlier detection algorithms and distance functions. Our framework achieved the best results in terms of effectiveness using the Local Outlier Factor algorithm and the Clark distance, while the average instrumentation overhead per intercepted call remains acceptable.

You can read the article here: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/scn/2019/8368473/

AUI Welcomes its New PIP Interns

09.06.2019

As part of its Presidential Internship Program, Al Akhawayn University welcomes 10 interns from the USA, Belarus, Switzerland, and Nigeria to be part of the AUI community during this academic year. Presidential interns are hosted by different departments, including the President's Office, Development and Communication, Office of Institutional research and Effectiveness, VPAA, Hillary Clinton Center and No Violence Alliance, VPSA and Residential Life, Internal Audit, Azrou Center, First-year experience, Student Activities Office and Office of Community Involvement, Health Center and Office of Interfaith Life.

SBA Student Climbs Mt. Fuji

08.28.2019

AUI students are reaching new heights on campus and abroad. SBA student Taha El Messaoudi recently climbed Mount Fuji during his exchange program in Japan. Mt. Fuji was just one part of an exciting tour of Japan for Taha.