8 students, 8 medals. Romania ranks fourth in the IOAI 2026 medal table

Romania concludes the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence, held in Astana from 2 to 8 August 2026, with an exceptional result. All eight students on the two national teams won medals: Alexandru Thury-Burileanu, Roland Petrean and David Georgescu won gold; Mihnea-Teodor Stoica and Darius-Adrian Dobre won silver; Iulian Nistor, Daniel-Antoniu Bence-Muk and Matei-Tudor Pop won bronze.

When results are aggregated by gold medals, followed by silver and bronze, Romania ranks fourth in the medal table. IOAI officially publishes individual standings; the country position is an aggregation of those results, also reported by Digi24. The three gold medals improve on 2025, when Romania won one gold medal.

The third IOAI brought together 466 contestants from 108 countries and territories. The individual contest consisted of two six-hour rounds, with three tasks in each round.

Tasks assessed both theoretical understanding and the ability to build, test and improve solutions under time pressure. Topics included machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing and multimodal processing.

The eight students were selected through the Romanian National Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence. ONIA offers a rigorous pathway for developing programming, mathematics and artificial intelligence skills, from the national stages to national-team selection.

Training also used ML Compete, a free educational and competition platform for solving problems, entering contests and automatically evaluating submissions.

Romania’s participation was organised and supported by the Ministry of Education and Research together with the Romanian Union of Computer Science Teachers and the Romanian Hub for Artificial Intelligence. Their work covered the ONIA stages, team selection, scientific and technical preparation and representation in Astana.

The two teams were coordinated by Robert Mihai Colca, a doctoral researcher at the West University of Timișoara, and Mihai Nan, a faculty member at the National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest. The delegation was accompanied by observers Antonio Bărbălău, representing Bitdefender, and Alexandru Costin Deonise, a POLITEHNICA Bucharest master’s graduate.

Bitdefender supported the delegation with funding, technical assistance and hardware resources used during training. Viva Credit also supported Romania’s participation at IOAI 2026. The Romanian Embassy in the Republic of Kazakhstan supported the students and coordinators and joined the official competition activities.