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DataSci Fest 2025 | March 30, 2025 | NU, Astana

DataSci Fest 2025 is Nazarbayev University's main Data Science event for students, researchers, technology enthusiasts, and anyone interested in Data Science.

The program includes:

• Talks by industry speakers
• Hands-on workshops and challenges
• Networking with like-minded people
• A career corner with companies and startups
• Merchandise, competitions, prizes, and much more

Date: Sunday, March 30. Venue: Nazarbayev University, Astana. Time: 9:30–17:30. Everyone can participate, regardless of major or student status!

To register, complete this form by March 29 at 19:00.

More about the event

Kazakhstan's first national AI olympiad for school students will take place this spring

The format of the qualifying round has already been set:

• Coding problem: unconventional logical and algorithmic tasks
• Math problem: mathematics applied to AI but accessible to school students
• Instruction-style problems: classical machine learning with the necessary theory and tips provided

If you have an idea that could be formalized into an elegant olympiad problem, please complete the form.

In return, we offer recognition, respect, credit at the olympiad, and a walkthrough of your problem's solution in our media!

Read the full regulations here.

KazLLM, developed by Kazakhstan's ISSAI institute at Nazarbayev University, received recognition from a highly respected figure: “At the AI Action Summit in Paris, I met a delegation from Kazakhstan that showed me KazLLM—a version of Llama adapted for Kazakh and other languages spoken in the region. Excellent results in Kazakh.”

Sincere congratulations from the DSML KZ community to everyone involved!

LinkedIn post ISSAI model

• Yann LeCun is a French AI scientist and one of the founders of the field of deep learning
• He pioneered neural networks and machine-learning algorithms, including convolutional neural network architecture (CNN)
• He currently works at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and is a professor at New York University

We recently wrote about community members creating benchmarks that evaluate large language models across several Kazakh-language datasets:

• MMLU in Kazakh: Evaluates multitask language understanding
• GSM8K in Kazakh: Tests mathematical reasoning
• Kazakh Constitution MC: Tests legal and civic knowledge
• Kazakh Dastur MC: Evaluates understanding of cultural heritage and customs
• Unified National Test MC: Covers history, literature, biology, and other subjects

We are happy to share that the first model-comparison results are now available!

• OpenAI's general-purpose GPT-4o confidently holds first place among all models
• In the open-source segment, Kazakhstan's ISSAI laboratory leads with LLaMA-3.1-KazLLM-1.0-8B

Next steps:

• Release an offline arena with ELO ratings
• Add more challenging benchmarks for real-world tasks
• Release custom instruction datasets

More details:

• View the leaderboard
• Submit your model

The team welcomes feedback and invites everyone interested to collaborate!