Mauritian universities are no longer in the game.

Introduction 

Mauritius is a tiny island with only 1.3 million people. Surprisingly, it has a high number of public Tertiary education institutions: University of Mauritius, University of Technology, University des Mascareignes and Open Univeristy. The information is obtained from this link: https://www.hec.mu/hei. All of those universities receive money from the government and have some kind of involvement in Computer Science & technology.

How much money do they get ?

University of Mauritius: Rs 615.8 M

University of Technology: Rs 70 M

University of Mascareignes: Rs 125.9 M

Open University: Rs 10 M

This is a LOT of money which is being poured into those universities every year as part of yearly grants. I would expect a LOT more from UoM, and UdM given that they are the 2 major beneficiaries. Every year, we have to work very hard to pay taxes to sustain this.

Gateway to Africa

Mauritius has often advertised itself as the gateway to Africa. How much of that is true today as African countries develop better infrastructure and increase access to the internet ? Personally,  I no longer buy this. I think we, as Mauritians, need to wake up. Countries such as Tunisia are rapidly positioning themselves as Suitable hosts for niche domains in the area of cryptography which is used by several companies to secure internet communications on a daily basis. 

Tunisia organized in 2023 the AfricaCrypt conference https://africacrypt2023.tn/ which is recognized by a prestigious and well respected academic organization known as IACR or International Association for Cryptologic Research. None of the Mauritian universities were present. Due to our geography, we remain isolated.

Mauritius is widely considered to have contributed to cryptography (see: https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/02/ssh_rc4_security/) for a long time. A large part of this work is done by the cyberstorm.mu group which is made up of students and engineers. However, the academic presence of Mauritian Universities at AfricaCrypt is ... 0. 

Repositioning Mauritius

The next AfricaCrypt conference is in Cameroon (https://www.africacrypt2024.com/). Will Universities of Mauritius have some kind of presence there ? Are we still a relevant leader in Africa ?

I hope to see at least a university from Mauritius present in the program committee of AfricaCrypt for 2024.

By browsing the list of committee members for 2023:

• Riham AlTawy, university of Victoria, Canada
• Laila El Aimani, University of Caddi Ayyad, Marocco
• Hoda Alkhzaimi, NYU Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
• Greg Alpar, Open University, The Netherlands
• Kevin Atighechi, University of Clermont-Ferrand, France
• Hatem M. Bahig, Ain Shams University, Egypt
• Hussain Benazza, UMI, ENSAM Meknes, Morocco
• Shivam Bhasin, Tamasek Lab, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Sebastien Canard, Orange Labs, France
• Suvradip Chakraborty, ETH, Switzerland
• Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Tingting Cui, HangZhou DianZi University, China
• Joan Daemen, Radboud University, The Netherlands
• Youssef El Housni, ConsenSys R&D, France
• Georgios Fotiadis, University of Luxembourg
• Emmanuel Fouotsa, University of Bamenda, Cameroun
• Gina Gallegos-Garcia, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico
• Romain Gay, IBM Research, Switzerland
• Loubna Ghammam, ITK Engineering Gmbh (Bosch), Germany
• Satrajit Ghosh, IIT Kharagpur, India
• Lorenzo Grassi, Radboud University, The Netherlands
• Javier Herranz, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
• Akinori Hosoyamada, NTT, Japan 
• Sorina Ionica, University of Picardie, France

• Juliane Kramer, TU Darmstadt, Germany
• Fabien Laguillaumie, University of Montpellier, France
• Patrick Longa, Microsoft Research, Redmond, US
• Marc Manzano, SandboxAQ, Spain
• Sarah McCarthy, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Marine Minier, Université de Lorraine, France
• Mainack Mondal, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), India
• Abderrahmane Nitaj, University of Caen Normandie, France
• Sami Omar, University of Bahrein, Bahrein
• Yanbin Pan, Chinese Academy of Science, China
• Sikhar Patranabis, IBM Research, India
• Christophe Petit, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
• Elizabeth A. Quaglia, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom
• Divya Ravi, Aarhus University, Denmark
• Joost Renes, NXP, The Netherlands
• Yann Rotella, Université Paris-Saclay, France
• Simona Samardjiska, Radboud University, The Netherlands
• Ali Aydin Selçuk, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey
• Dave Singelee, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Djiby Sow, University of Dakar, Senegal
• Pontelimon Stanica, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, USA
• Vanessa Vitse, University of Grenoble, France
• Souheib Yousfi, University of Carthage, Tunisia

 

we can see Tunisia, Cameroon, Senegal and Morocco. Even Singapore is present despite being a small country. 

Are we still playing football ?

Mauritius has a strong football culture. However, we aren't known for our strong performance during FIFA. We are mostly known as a tourist destination. No big country is sweating when Mauritius plays a football match because we are not considered a threat. We are out of the global football game.

For cryptography, we are taken seriously as Mauritius has contributed to both design and implementation of cryptography which is used globally. and yet, we have 0 academic contribution to AfricaCrypt. 

Mauritius as a country specialized in cryptography

Having laid out the foundation of a niche market in Mauritius, we are in a unique position to become the african leaders. However, our major pain point is the lack of academic involvement in cryptography from Mauritian Universities. Once we are able to fix this, we can move forward to doing Research with Practical application that can create new markets for Local companies in Mauritius. Are our universities ready to do that ?