UKOAI
Sign Up
The UK Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (UKOAI) is a national competition for schools and colleges to select for the UK's International Al Olympiad team.
Sign Up for UKOAI 2026
OUR AIMS
Supported by
In partnership with
The team (Anango Prabhat, Samuel Johnson, Dylan Austin and Akshara Maddineni) came away with 2 silvers and 1 bronze medal at the IOAI 2025 in Beijing, China.
Jan - Feb 2026
Register and Prepare
The exam consists of three long-form questions that test programming and mathematical ability in deep learning.
We recommend looking at our resources below, and trying the sample papers on the IOAI website.
7th March 2026
Online UKOAI Test
March 2026
Interview Stage
Marking of the exam will take place immediately. High scorers of the exam shall be invited to a video interview with a UKOAI mentor in mid-March.
The interview will further test each student's problem-solving ability. Those that perform well will be invited to the training and selection camp.
Exact Dates TBD
Training Camp
An invite-only multi-day training and selection programme takes place in April or May. Students will have lectures in AI, practice papers, and do team building activities.
Four participants will be selected from this camp for the team to represent the UK at IOAI 2025.
May - July 2026
IOAI First Round
The selected team will have extra training sessions in May and June in preparation for the IOAI. Each team member will be assigned a mentor from academia or industry.
The first round of the IOAI starts in July 2026 with an at-home task. All team members will be expected to work on this throughout July.
2nd-8th August 2026
IOAI Main Contests
The IOAI takes place 2-8th August 2026 in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
There will be 2 contests: the first being a continuation of the at home task, and the second of unseen novel tasks.
During the week, there are also a number of social and cultural events that the team can attend.
Here are some resources that will be useful when preparing for the UKOAI exam. We expect people who do well in the exam to have some knowledge of the following areas.
PyTorch
Machine Learning
Transformers
Word Embeddings
THE UKOAI ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Umang is an Assistant Professor in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Computer Science at King’s College, Cambridge, having previously held faculty and research roles at New York University and the Alan Turing Institute.
Euan is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic. He previously represented the UK at the International Olympiad in Informatics, placing 91st in the world.
James is currently working as a content developer for ARENA. He has a BA and MMath from University of Cambridge. Before this, he conducted research into improving the safety of AI systems.
Aaliya is a Software Engineer at Wise and a Polaris Fellow. She has years of experience working in operational roles in EdTech.
Chloe is the programme lead and content developer of ARENA, a leading AI training programme. Before this she ran AI learning initiatives at University of Cambridge, where she studied for her BA.
Rhea is a Management Consultant at BCG and previously an Investment Banker at Lazard. She has experience working in tech across her roles.
If you are a student, teacher or parent, register to sign up to take the test for 2026. For enquiries, please email aaliya@ukoai.org.
Sign Up for UKOAI 2026
