FAV hosted the finals of the Czech AI Olympiad. The event brought together forty-five teams

In Pilsen, contestants from 12 regions proposed practical applications of AI in mobility, healthcare, and public administration. In the national finals of the AI Olympiad, they compared their skills and learned new ones. Experts from the UWB Faculty of Applied Sciences served as mentors and judges.

160 high school students competed in Pilsen in the finals of the Czech AI Olympiad. Both individuals and teams took part. Within a limited time, they had to propose solutions to real-world problems in artificial intelligence. The final nationwide round of the first AI Olympiad (AIO) for high school students was hosted in the second half of June by the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. Their experts not only served as mentors and judges, but also assigned specific tasks. They themselves explore AI topics in their research and assign similar tasks to their students.

For example, in the challenge designed by Jan Pospíšil from the Department of Mathematics, contestants had to teach an artificial intelligence system to mimic an unknown function without knowing its exact formula. "It's as if you were given a huge table of measurements and had to use it to derive the most accurate rule possible that governs how the system works. Similar problems arise in practice, for example, in medicine when estimating risks based on measured data, in education when modeling student progress, in engineering when simulating complex processes, or wherever an exact calculation is too slow or unknown and we need to replace it with a fast and reliable model," Pospíšil explained.

Meanwhile, Jan Švec from the Department of Cybernetics focused on language models and their training. He let the contestants develop a program that uses AI tools to distinguish between positive and negative reviews. AIO participants thus saw for themselves how the model analyzes Czech texts when trained exclusively on foreign-language data. "This means that even though the English sentence 'The product is terrible' and the Czech sentence 'Ten produkt je hrozný' are composed of completely different words, the model will ideally convert them into very similar numerical vectors," Švec added.

"Representatives from the Faculty of Applied Sciences and industry partners were part of the mentoring teams and helped students shape their solutions. That is precisely where the value of the AI Olympiad lies, not just in competing, but in truly learning and growing," said Pavel König, director of the organizing body, NVIAS. According to him, the Czech AI Olympiad reveals the innovative potential of artificial intelligence in the hands of high school students. It transforms them from passive users into active creators. The competition thus benefits both the contestants and the event's partners. The goal is to identify talent, connect them with real-world experience, and prepare them for international competitions.

The winners of the regional rounds advanced to the Czech AIO finals in Plzeň. They competed in two tracks. High school teams competed in the AI Startup track. They worked in categories focused on government, healthcare, or mobility. Individuals then competed in the AI Tech track. The top four students from this group have advanced to the International AI Olympiad, where they will represent the entire Czech Republic on August 26 in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The names of the representatives and detailed results of the national finals are available on the Olympiad's website.