The "Département des sciences de l'informatique" of the "Faculté des Sciences de Tunis" is part of the "Université des Sciences, des Technologies et de Medecine Tunis II". It is headed by Prof. Mohammed Moalla and performs R&D in three major teams :
(1) Equipe de Recherche de Programmation, Algorithmique et Heuristique (ERPAH) which was founded in 1984 and is now under the direction of Prof. Ali Jaoua. With 2 Professors, 30 researchers and 15 PhD students this team is strong in several areas:
(a) Software Engineering (Logic of programming): modularisation, specification, conceptual modelling, verification, formal methods, reuse;
(b) Information science: extraction of knowledge from data, information abstraction, symbolic learning, relational fundamentals of information, document database, algorithms and heuristics for knowledge extraction, natural language;
(c) Database: minimisation of redundancy, deductive and object-oriented databases;
(d) Distributed Systems: fault tolerance
(2) Algorithmique et Programmation Parallèles (APP). This team formed in 1988 has 1 Professor (Zaher Mahjoub) and 10 researchers and works on:
(a) parallel computing to support GIS in co-operation with IRSIT and under DGIII funding using the work is based on transputer technology;
(b) a project with a French group PRISM funded by the French Government ;
(c) VOLVOX: a parallel database system funded by the Tunisian Government.
For the future, the team plan to work on reconstruction of missing data values and further parallelisation of databases. This team is well-connected to European ( especially French) R&D.
(3) Productique et Informatique d'Entreprise (PIE). This is the newest team with 1 Professor (Mohammed Moalla - also Head of Department), 11 researchers and 3 PhD students. The aim is to marry together production systems and IT systems. The main topics are:
(a) conceptualisation and modelling of production systems (especially real-time)
(b) tools for specification and analysis of parallel and real-time systems (in co-operation with two French teams: MASI (Paris) and VERIMAG (Grenoble) and funded by the French Government);
(c) temporal databases.
There is much expertise in advanced use of Petri nets and a large number of publications. For the future they plan more application to production systems.
Overall it is clear that the three teams at FST work together, complementing each other. The work is clearly of national standard and some of it fully international in quality. They have good international contacts (especially with France) and participate in many conferences.