Jamaica wins bronze at international AI Olympiad
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From left, Campion College students Jozanne Thompson, Matthew Williams, Amari Cross and Tori Senior, who represented Jamaica at the recent International Olympiad of AI in Astana, Kazakhstan.
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From left, coach Chad Sutherland, Matthew Williams, Amari Cross, Tori Senior, Jozanne Thompson, and team leader Marvin G. Hall, who represented Jamaica at the recent International Olympiad of AI in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Seventeen-year-old Campion College student Matthew Williams has earned a bronze medal at the International Olympiad of AI (IOAI), held recently in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Held under the patronage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the IOAI is one of the newest and fastest-growing international science Olympiads, bringing together some of the world’s brightest high-school students to compete in a specific subject area, in this case, artificial intelligence (AI).
This year, 466 contestants from 108 countries participated. Jamaica fielded a four-member team coached by Chad Sutherland, comprising Campion College students Tori Senior (17), Amari Cross (17), Jozanne Thompson (15), and Williams.
Williams finished 116th overall. Students from Russia, Kazakhstan and China claimed the top three places. A total of 37 gold, 73 silver and 110 bronze medals were awarded, with competitors earning medals based on their score ranges.
In the individual competition, contestants completed six tasks over two days, drawing on various areas of AI, including machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing and multimodal processing.
One task involved reconstructing conversations between two speakers. The dialogue from each speaker was stored separately in audio files, with segments randomly shuffled so that the conversations no longer made sense. The data set contained conversations consisting of between seven and 20 segments, and students were required to restore them to their correct chronological order.
Using a provided AI model, competitors had to modify code to produce the most accurate prediction of the correct sequence for each conversation.
This was Jamaica’s second appearance at the International Olympiad of AI, following its debut in Beijing, China, last year. Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, had originally been scheduled to host the 2025 competition, but the event was moved to Astana because of the US-Israeli versus Iran war. Next year’s Olympiad will be held in Singapore.
“We were hosted at KNUS, Kazakhstan National University of Sports, a brand-new facility which is opening student enrolment in September. Kazakhstan is positioning to be the Silicon Valley of central Asia, driven by a minister of AI, Astana Hub (a technology park), Alem.ai (an AI museum and centre for AI) and home to the founders of Telegram and Higgsfield AI, who were sponsors of this year’s event, Marvin G. Hall, team leader and founder of Halls of Learning said.
Hall noted that the event receives support from global tech giants like Huawei, Google, Galbot (humanoid robots), and also Quant Trading firms, like Jane Street and IMC who actively use it to recruit talent.
“We are proud of Jamaica’s consecutive medals two years in a row and look forward to next year’s AI Olympiad in Singapore,” Hall added.
Coach Sutherland believes technical problems on the first day caused much of the Jamaican team, along with many other competitors, to struggle, making the second day “a better representation of the team’s performance”.
Williams, who won a silver medal last year, shared a similar view.
“Day one would have changed it for me, (if I had done better on day one), I would have scored a silver medal.”
editorial@gleanerjm.com