Bucharest, May 2025 – The University of Bucharest hosted the first government-supported edition of ONIA (Romania’s National AI Olympiad) from 16-19 May 2025, gathering over 150 of Romania’s brightest high-school students. The participants were selected from a county-level qualifying round on 29 April, which saw over 400 students competing nationwide. The event featured an opening ceremony, a rigorous five-hour competition, workshops, and an awards ceremony, all held at the Faculty of Mathematics & Computer Science.

Selection Process for IOAI 2025  

The Romanian delegation for the 2025 International Olympiad in AI (IOAI) in Beijing was chosen through a three-stage selection process:  
1. County Round (29 April) – Over 400 students competed in the initial qualifier.  
2. National Round (16-19 May) – The top 150 advanced to the finals in Bucharest.  
3. Training & Selection Camp (17-24 June) – The top 8 students were selected after three 5-hour exams testing their skills in NLP, Computer Vision, and theoretical AI.  

Nitro AI Judge – A Dedicated Olympiad Platform 

All rounds took place on Nitro AI Judge, a custom-built platform designed to mirror the structure of international AI competitions. Key features include:  
– Fair & Achievable Scoring – All tasks were calibrated so a perfect score (100/100) is attainable, regardless of evaluation metrics.  
– Live Leaderboard & Q&A – Participants could submit questions privately, with answers automatically made public if answered.  
– Preparation Hub – Similar to platforms like Codeforces, it helps students train effectively with solvable, syllabus-aligned problems.  

Workshops & Training

To support participants, ONIA organized multiple training sessions:  
– Regional Phase: Past IOAI competitors created introductory video tutorials (publicly available here).  
– National Phase: PhD students and teaching assistants from the University of Bucharest led hands-on workshops available here. 
– IOAI Selection Camp: Professors from across Romania covered advanced topics, including Vision Transformers, fine-tuning language models, multimodal learning, and logical reasoning (materials to be published soon).

The top 8 students will represent Romania at IOAI 2025 in Beijing, showcasing the country’s growing talent in artificial intelligence.  

Voices from the participants

“This olympiad pushes us to model real-world data, not just write algorithms—it rewards critical thinking as much as code.” — Ștefan Asandei, Gold Medal (radioiasi.ro)

“Because AI is so new as an academic subject, reliable resources are hard to find; ONIA gives us a priceless benchmark of where we stand.” — Lorena Danțoș, Silver Medal (radioiasi.ro)

Media coverage & further reading

• University of Bucharest press release on hosting ONIA 2025: unibuc.ro
• Official ONIA website (schedule, problems, full participant list): olimpiada-ai.ro