News

The 48th ACM ICPC World Finals are happening in Astana right now! Follow the standings and cheer for our teams 🇰🇿

AI olympiad for school students: This year, Bulgaria will host the first international AI olympiad for school students in partnership with Google, similar to the IMO, IPhO, or IOI.

Thanks to your timely support in spreading the word, we were able to assemble a team for the olympiad!

The Competitive Programming Federation, CPFed KZ, has taken responsibility for organizing the team.

Kazakhstan will be represented by: 1) Yersultan Abzhami — Astana NurOrda, Grade 11, Codeforces: syrtin (maximum 2244); 2) Nurislam Syrgabayev — Kyzylorda BIL, Grade 11, Codeforces: Nuris (maximum 2168); 3) Vladislav Possin — Almaty School No. 165, Grade 11, Codeforces: Tima3 (maximum 2139); 4) Akezhan Askar — Semey NIS, Grade 10, Codeforces: mispertion20 (maximum 2205).

We are now looking for volunteers who can help the students prepare and represent Kazakhstan strongly at the olympiad.

Format:

• Two weeks of remote consultations

Topics:

• Classical machine learning
• Computer vision
• NLP

Contact: You can volunteer directly through @Yergalife.

Leave questions and suggestions in the comments or in the Education topic of our community.

An AI olympiad for school students

This year, Bulgaria will host the first International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence for school students in partnership with Google, similar to the IMO, IPhO, or IOI.

IOAI is a prestigious annual competition for high school students who are passionate about the exciting world of artificial intelligence. Its mission is to inspire and challenge young minds to explore AI's limitless possibilities while fostering the next generation of AI pioneers and problem solvers.

Kazakhstan's team: Unfortunately, Kazakhstan is not on the list of participating countries, but there is still a little time to organize and apply.

It would be great if you shared this post with AI enthusiasts you know, principals of ambitious schools, or organizers of educational programs who could arrange for our students to participate.

The DSML Kazakhstan community promises to provide mentoring and training support.

Preparation: The competition focuses on three areas of AI—Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision. Teams compete in a Scientific Round and a Practical Round. More about preparation is available in Alexander Gushchin's blog; he will train the Russian team for the competition.

A long-form interview has been published with Yerzat Dulat, a pioneer of our community and an outstanding AI researcher also widely known as higgsfield.

Yerzat and his team at Higgsfield AI successfully raised $8 million in the United States for their new Diffuse platform. The mobile app lets users create video content from a text prompt from scratch, using either ready-made clips or their own photos.

Highlights from the interview:

• Education and early career:

“After school, I studied computer science for about two or three years. Later, though, I got bored and started looking for something new. That is how I discovered machine learning. In 2016, the field was still far from the hype. In fact, Kazakhstan barely had any machine-learning specialists at the time.”

• Conversation with OpenAI:

“OpenAI reached out to me in 2018. After I published one of my machine-learning papers, company co-founder John Schulman emailed me and invited me to join the team. But I decided to work on my own projects.”

• Higgsfield AI's competitive advantage:

“Sora targets Hollywood producers, while we target marketing departments at companies that need to create large amounts of social-media content. We can help them reduce costs significantly.”

• Raising investment:

“I told investors that we are an Asian country with a strong school of mathematics inherited from the Soviet era. That appeals to Americans because they like working with Asians.”

• The future of generative AI

“Within a year, AI services will be able to generate content indistinguishable from content made by people.”