News

NeurIPS 2026 is coming, with the Competition Track featuring 16 competitions on various topics:

• Scientific AI, Physics & Engineering: Learn2Design, Smart Buildings, Fusion Equilibrium, RealPDE, FAIR Universe Weak Lensing.
• Healthcare/Bio: SimulacraBench, AMP Challenge, Speech Accessibility Project Challenge 2, Virtual Embryo.
• Foundation Models, Reasoning & AI Evaluation: Steerability, Predictive AI Evaluation, AIMO Interpretability, QuantiPhy.
• Robotics, Agents & Embodied AI: RoboSyn, RoCo-Spring, Agenthon for qunatitative finance

Several more competitions will take place as part of workshops: EEG/EMG Foundation Challenge, AV Causal Reasoning Retrieval Challenge, Lean Refactor Arena, AgentOdyssey.

Most competitions run in September and October. It is a great opportunity for anyone interested—including school students and people outside research—to tackle frontier problems faced by top labs, publish a paper about their solution, and attend the largest AI conference.

Asel Yermekova has compiled Awesome Kazakh Datasets—a large, carefully structured collection of open datasets for the Kazakh language. It brings together data for:

• NLP and LLM: QA, RAG, instruction tuning, NER, machine translation, and other tasks
• speech: ASR, TTS, speech translation, emotion recognition
• computer vision, OCR, and multimodal tasks

For each dataset, the collection lists its size, scale, task, release year, and download link. It also separately marks resources that were announced but could not yet be independently verified.

Repositories like this make life much easier: instead of spending hours searching, you can quickly see what Kazakh-language data already exists and what you can use for your research or product.

If you know of a dataset that is not yet on the list, the repository is open for contributions: 🔗 https://github.com/Allessyer/awesome-kaz-datasets

Thanks to Asel for this work, and to Alen Issayev for helping develop it!

Our champions! Kazakhstan’s team won 2 gold, 2 silver and 4 bronze medals at IOAI!

Gold: Dauzhan Beketov, Sultanbi Issatay Silver: Abu Kanabek and Alem Amenov. Bronze: Ulugbek Osmanov, Zhanibek Kassymkhan, Islamnur Kusainov and Dinmukhammed Yntyqbay.

Our team delivered excellent results! What’s more, Dauzhan didn’t just win gold—he placed second overall among all participants! This is a tremendous achievement!

We’re incredibly proud of our students and coaches!

Our team at the IOAI 2026 opening!

Team members: Abu Kanabek, Dauzhan Beketov, Sultanbi Issatay, Islamnur Kussainov, Ulugbek Osmanov, Alem Amenov, Dinmukhammed Yntyqbay and Zhanibek Kassymkhan.

And of course, Jimmy and Kona — the team’s coaches.