The International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence is three years old, and Bangladesh’s results trace a neat line through all three: no medals in Bulgaria in 2024, two bronzes in China in 2025, and now three bronzes at IOAI 2026 in Astana, Kazakhstan, where results were announced at Friday’s closing ceremony. In a field of 437 competitors from 107 countries, that is a team that is getting better on purpose.
The medallists
- Labib Shahriar, Class 10, Homna Adarsha High School, Cumilla
- Md Saiduzzaman, Class 11, Moulvibazar Government College
- Mobtasim Chowdhury, Class 11, Notre Dame College, Dhaka
The fourth team member was Ananya Zarif Akand, Class 11, Munnu International School and College, Manikganj. The team was led by Professor B M Mainul Hossain of the University of Dhaka’s Institute of Information Technology and coached by Mohammad Azam Khan, an associate professor at Daffodil International University. Two of the four medal-winning students come from outside Dhaka, and one is still in Class 10.
What the contest tests
This is not a quiz about AI. After the opening on 2 August, competitors sat two individual machine-learning rounds on 4 and 6 August, each six hours long with three problems: given a dataset and a task, build and train a model that performs well on held-out data, under time pressure, with real code. Students also took part in team activities across national lines. The skills rewarded — data cleaning, model selection, disciplined experimentation — are exactly the ones the AI industry hires for, which makes this olympiad unusually close to practical work.
How a student gets there
The route runs through the Bangladesh AI Olympiad, organised by the Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN). Activities began in April, regional rounds were held in May — in person in Dhaka, Chattogram and Rangpur, and online for Rajshahi, Khulna and the rest of the country — and the national round took place on 16 May at the Bangladesh University of Business and Technology. Training camps for the selected squad followed. The structure mirrors the maths and informatics olympiads that have produced Bangladesh’s earlier international medals, and it is open to any school student who registers.
The coaches’ own verdict
Professor Hossain was pleased but explicit that there is room to improve, and Saiduzzaman put the motivation plainly: a medal exists to inspire the students who come after. The trend line supports both. Three bronzes is not yet a silver; it is, however, the sign of a programme that knows what it is doing, two years in.
