The first International Olympiad in AI for high school students will be held in Bulgaria from August 9-15, 2024. Organized by the LERAI Foundation, the competition will test students on machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. Sponsors include Google and MBZUAI, with organizers hoping participants pursue further AI education and careers. Why it matters: This event aims to cultivate global AI talent and could increase interest in AI education and careers in the GCC region, particularly at MBZUAI.
The International Olympiad in AI (IOAI), a competition for high school students in NLP, CV, and robotics, will be hosted in Abu Dhabi by MBZUAI in 2026. MBZUAI faculty members Yova Kementchedjhieva and Maxim Panov are part of IOAI's International Scientific Committee and helped bring the event to the UAE. The IOAI 2025 in Beijing included individual contests, team challenges, and the GAITE program, testing participants with AI tasks and generalization challenges. Why it matters: Hosting IOAI in Abu Dhabi highlights the UAE's commitment to fostering AI talent and positions MBZUAI as a key player in global AI education.
Alexander Gasnikov from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology presented a talk on open problems in convex optimization. The talk covered stochastic averaging vs stochastic average approximation, saddle-point problems and accelerated methods, homogeneous federated learning, and decentralized optimization. Gasnikov's research focuses on optimization algorithms and he has published in NeurIPS, ICML, EJOR, OMS, and JOTA. Why it matters: While the talk itself isn't directly related to GCC AI, understanding convex optimization is crucial for advancing machine learning algorithms used in the region.
Ekaterina Vylomova from the University of Melbourne gave a talk on using NLP models to advance research in linguistic morphology, typology, and social psychology. The talk covered using models to study morphology, phonetic changes in words over time, and diachronic changes in language semantics. Vylomova presented the UniMorph project, a cross-lingual annotation schema and database with morphological paradigms for over 150 languages. Why it matters: This research demonstrates the potential of NLP to contribute to a deeper understanding of language evolution and structure, with applications in linguistic research and the study of social and cultural changes.
Chess grandmaster Susan Polgar visited KAUST during the 2018 Winter Enrichment Program and played a simultaneous chess exhibition with 10 KAUST Chess Club members, winning against all of them. Polgar also delivered a lecture on how AI has transformed the chess world, referencing the 1997 IBM supercomputer victory over Garry Kasparov. She expressed being impressed by KAUST's facilities and the resources available to faculty and students. Why it matters: This event highlights KAUST's engagement with AI-related topics beyond traditional research, showcasing the university as a hub for diverse intellectual discussions.