A team from Bangladesh has recently won two silver medals and two bronze medals at the first-ever International Artificial Intelligence Olympiad (IAIO). This year, a total of 25 countries competed at the event, including Morocco, New Zealand, Poland, Turkey, and the United States.  

The two silver awards for Bangladesh were won by Misbah Uddin Inan (Notre Dame College) and Arefin Anwar (Saint Joseph College). The two bronze awards were won by Abrar Shahid (Notre Dame College) and Rafid Ahmed (Academia, Lalmatia). The team was led by Dr B M Mainul Hossain, Director at the Institute of Information Technology, Dhaka University.

The event was organised from September 8 to 12, 2024, with the award ceremony being held at the King Abdulaziz International Convention Centre, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The competition was hosted by the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI) with the support of UNESCO and the International Center for AI Research and Ethics (ICAIRE). This inaugural event aimed to develop and maintain ethical standards in the global research field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), according to the official website of IAIO 2024. 

"AI is the new normal, so it should be anything but a niche," shared Misbah Uddin Inan, a silver awardee at the event. According to him, Bangladesh has yet to make AI a norm. However, with the proper training and dedicated effort, he envisions a Bangladesh that will lead the global AI realm.

Arefin Anwar, another silver awardee, shared details about the competition. "For practical or coding rounds, we had only one problem for 5 hours where we had to conduct deep feature engineering." He added that he enjoyed the overall competition, and is hopeful this experience will help him to grow further. 

The competition was divided into two parts: scientific and practical. Medals were awarded holistically, meaning students who performed well in both rounds got medals. The scientific round was a pen-and-paper round to test theoretical knowledge about the mathematics behind AI. Team Bangladesh performed decently in theory. However, they surpassed themselves in the practical round, which is similar to a programming contest where participants create a live AI model and its accuracy is tested. 

In the practical round, a live leaderboard was published on 30% of testing data. Misbah Uddin Inan from Bangladesh managed to stay at rank 1 for 2 hours in the 5-hour competition. After testing on the other 70% of private test data and other evaluations, the final practical round ranks were: Misbah Uddin Inan (18th), Arefin Anwar (24th), Abrar Shahid (43rd), and Rafid Ahmed (64th).

The competition covered a range of relevant fields in AI, such as Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks, and Machine Learning. The competitors had restricted internet access during the competition. All programming and modelling was done in Python. 

"Hands-on experience and training are essential," shared Dr B M Mainul Hossain, leader of the Bangladesh team in the competition. "Learning how AI can be applied to effectively solve real-world challenges effectively should be our focus," he added. 

Regarding the formation of the team, M. O. B. Jihad, Coordinator of the Bangladesh team for IAIO 2024, shared, "Our goal was to identify talent from across the country, train them, and prepare them for the international stage. We are confident that, starting next year, our students will rank among the very best."