For students
What does MAIO offer to me as a student?
The Malaysia AI Olympiad is a challenging competition that tests students in high school (or younger!) on their mastery of knowledge in artificial intelligence. Students that do well will be invited to participate in the MAIO Training School, and will have the opportunity for selection to represent Malaysia at the International Olympiad of Artificial Intelligence (IOAI).
The MAIO Training School is one of the most comprehensive AI training curriculums available to high school students in Malaysia, is organized at no cost to students, and has a track record of producing Malaysian medallists at past editions of IOAI.
Both the Malaysia AI Olympiad as a competition and the MAIO Training School are part of our MAIO Training and Selection Programme. Please refer to the 2027 season calendar to know what activities we have in store for you in 2027!
Eligibility
Eligibility to participate in the MAIO Training and Selection Programme strictly follows the participation criteria of IOAI:
- Students must have not started university.
- Students must be less than 20 years old. 19++ years is OK, but 20 years old is not
Note that pre-university education programmes in Malaysia count as Grade 12 in the K12 education system, and thus students enrolled in these programmes are eligible for participation as long as they fulfill the limit. For sake of clarity, examples of pre-university education programmes include but are not limited to: Form 6, A-Levels, International Baccalaureate, Foundation, matriculation, Asasi etc. Students enrolled in Diploma programmes are considered to be receiving tertiary education beyond Grade 12, and thus are not eligible.
How can I get prepared?
Preparing for AI Olympiads can seem daunting, given the vast and rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence. On top of that, AI subjects are only taught in university curriculums! You might feel overwhelmed when starting out and that’s okay. All great journeys begin with small steps.
As a pre-requisite, you will want to be familiar with programming in Python and Jupyter Notebooks. The easiest notebook to access will be Google Colab, which is free of charge for limited usage. Otherwise, you can install Jupyter Lab on your own computer.
Next, go through common machine learning / deep learning topics and self-study them. The internet and generative language models like ChatGPT are your best friend here. Learn how to use generative language tools to guide you through new material.
IOAI Scientific Committee has released a syllabus to guide your learning as a starting point: IOAI 2026 syllabus. Note that audio processing is a new topic added in 2026!
In addition, you can find links to past problems on Github for IOAI 2024, IOAI 2025, and IOAI 2026.
Reading material recommendations:
- Deep Learning for Python as a structured guide to Pytorch
- Bishop’s Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning book as a reference text for machine learning
- d2l.ai for deep learning
Specifically for Malaysian students:
- Here is a guide to AI olympiads in Malaysia written thanks to the efforts of The Olympiad Initiative and former national team members: IOAI Guide
- Please see the Past Problems page to get familiar with the style of Malaysian tasks
One of wonderful things about AI is that information is readily shared. Most top papers can be read for free on arxiv.org, and seminal papers tend to have code implementations on github.com.
Happy learning!