Dates

Competition Schedule

  • Registration & Community Access: Open immediately via Discord.
  • Competition Start (Problem Statement Release): December 9, 2025, at 1:15 PM IST (Indian Standard Time).
  • Submission Deadline: January 8, 2026, at 8:00 AM IST.
  • Judging Period: January 8, 2026, to January 10, 2026.
  • Winner Announcement: January 10, 2026, at 5:00 PM IST.

Note: The Kaggle competition link will be released exclusively in the community Discord server at the start time.

Eligibility
  • Participant Profile: This competition is open to students, researchers, and developers worldwide. There are no specific academic restrictions; high school students, undergraduates, and professionals are all welcome.
  • Team Structure: Participants may compete individually or in teams of up to four (4) members. All team members must be listed on the Devpost submission.
  • Conflict of Interest: Organizers, mentors, and IOAI community leaders directly involved in the creation of the problem statements are strictly prohibited from participating in the prize pool.
  • Legal Compliance: This competition is void where prohibited by local law. Participants are responsible for ensuring their participation complies with their local jurisdiction's regulations.
Project and Submission Requirements

To be considered for evaluation, all participants must adhere to the following technical and procedural requirements:

  • Platform Requirement: All machine learning models must be trained and evaluated using the datasets provided on the official Kaggle Community Competition page.
  • Submission Deliverables:
    • A link to a public source code repository (GitHub, GitLab) or a public Kaggle Notebook.
    • A detailed project description on Devpost summarizing the methodology.
    • A "Open Notebook" containing the code, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and comments explaining the architectural decisions.
  • Technical Constraints:
    • No Wrapper Applications: Solutions that rely primarily on API calls to external, pre-trained "black box" services (e.g., OpenAI API, Anthropic API) for the core reasoning or prediction task will be disqualified. Participants must engineer the model pipeline themselves.
    • Plagiarism: Code submissions will be screened for plagiarism. Submissions found to be direct copies of public kernels without significant modification or attribution will be immediately disqualified.
Prizes
  • Distribution Policy: Prizes are non-transferable and cannot be exchanged for cash.
  • Verification: Winning teams may be subject to a "Defense Interview" with the judging panel. During this interview, participants must be able to explain their code, hyperparameter choices, and mathematical logic. Failure to demonstrate understanding of the submitted solution will result in forfeiture of the prize.
  • Deployment Requirement: For prizes involving domain names (.xyz), winners may be required to deploy their model or a portfolio showcasing the project to redeem the prize.

The decisions of the judging panel, comprised of IOAI achievers and community mentors, are final and binding in all matters relating to this competition.