Bronze Medal
3rd International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI), individual contest. Represented Mali 🇲🇱.
Announcement on LinkedIn ↗- 140thworldwide
- 2ndamong African participants
- 1stin Mali
AI / ML · Research interests · Competitive programming
Aboubacar
Diarra
Building a strong foundation in artificial intelligence, one experiment and one problem at a time.
I’m a student from Mali interested in machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and applied AI. I represent Mali in international AI Olympiads and build projects to learn by doing.
01 / ACHIEVEMENTS
Two AI Olympiad medals in 2026.
Bronze at the first African Olympiad in AI in April, then bronze at the third International Olympiad in AI in August, representing Mali.
Bronze Medal
1st African Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (AOAI), the continental competition.
17th
overall
National AI Olympiad
Top 10 national certificate. The national pathway where this journey started.
- National pathway, Mali
- AOAI, Tunisia
- IOAI, Kazakhstan
COURSES & CERTIFICATES
- Elements of AI, University of Helsinki (January–February 2026)
- HP LIFE: Cybersecurity awareness, and Data science and analytics (November 2025)
Completed courses, listed separately from competition results.
02 / ABOUT
Curiosity first.
Build, test, learn.
I’m an aspiring AI researcher and competitive programmer based in Mali. My learning combines hands-on machine learning projects with problem-solving and preparation for AI Olympiads.
I’m especially interested in practical AI: systems that can interpret images, learn from data, and make language technology more useful in under-resourced contexts. I’m continuing to develop my technical skills while prioritizing my final year of secondary school.
My long-term goal is to contribute to useful AI research and help expand opportunities for young people interested in science and technology in Mali and across Africa.
This site distinguishes completed achievements and existing projects from research interests and work in progress.
03 / EXPERIENCE
Where I learn and contribute.
A selection of roles and learning communities connected to my AI journey. Dates and descriptions are included where available; this section distinguishes ongoing participation from formal employment.
OCTOBER 2026 — PRESENT
SOTA AI — Community Problem Solver
Role in the SOTA AI community, as listed on my LinkedIn profile. Specific responsibilities are not detailed here.
SEPTEMBER 2026 — PRESENT
Cohere Labs — Open Science Member
Participation in the Cohere Labs Open Science community. This listing reflects community membership, not employment at Cohere.
SEPTEMBER 2026 — PRESENT
GCI World — Matsuo-Iwasawa Lab, University of Tokyo
Participant in the GCI World program by the Matsuo-Iwasawa Lab at the University of Tokyo. This is a program participation, not employment or supervised university research.
JUNE 2025 — PRESENT
RobotsMali — AI Trainee / AI Intern
Advanced training in machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing, and preparation for the International Olympiad in AI. Now also mentoring the incoming team preparing for international competition.
APRIL — JUNE 2025
RobotsMali — National AI Olympiad pathway
Participated in the national AI Olympiad preparation and selection pathway, which led to a Top 10 national certificate.
04 / RESEARCH
Questions I want to explore.
These are research interests, not claims of published research. I’m using projects and continued study to build the foundations needed to investigate them rigorously.
01 / VISION
Computer vision
Image classification, visual recognition, model evaluation and efficient deep-learning workflows.
02 / LANGUAGE
Low-resource NLP
Exploring language technology for African languages, with a particular interest in Bambara and machine translation.
03 / APPLIED AI
AI for real-world problems
Practical machine-learning applications, including agricultural use cases and data-driven tools.
04 / METHODS
Model training & evaluation
Learning how architecture choices, validation, metrics and experimentation affect model performance.
05 / PROJECTS
Selected work.
A selection of repositories and learning projects. Descriptions stay deliberately factual; add measured results, demos, datasets and technical write-ups as each project is documented.
01
AgriMali-AI
My applied-AI project exploring plant-disease detection from leaf images using computer vision. The project direction has included PyTorch and EfficientNetV2, with the broader aim of making agricultural information more accessible. Check the repository for the current implementation and project status.
02
100_ml_projects
The “100 ML Real Projects Challenge”, a collection of machine-learning projects that I co-authored.
03
KalanWEB — Early web development project
I created KalanWEB in 10th grade while learning HTML, CSS and building websites with AI-assisted coding (“vibe coding”). The site explored an educational platform idea for students in Mali. It is now inactive and no longer has an active user community; I include it as an early learning milestone, not as a currently maintained product.
04
my-first-lstm
An initial implementation of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network using PyTorch, created as part of learning recurrent neural networks.
05
Learning PyTorch ML for Kaggle
A repository for learning machine-learning workflows with PyTorch and working on Kaggle competition tasks.
06
Studigram Olympiad Scraper
A scraper project for collecting olympiad-related information. See the repository for supported sources, usage and implementation details.
06 / SKILLS
Tools and foundations.
Programming
Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Machine learning
PyTorch, scikit-learn, model training and evaluation
AI domains
Computer vision, natural language processing, applied AI
Interests
Mathematics, competitive programming, robotics and AI for African languages
This list describes tools and areas represented in my current portfolio. It is not a claim of expert-level proficiency in every item.
07 / COMMUNITY
Learning is better when shared.
My involvement in AI Olympiads has connected my personal learning to a wider community of students, mentors and coaches working to grow AI skills in Mali.
RobotsMali & AI Olympiads
My AI learning and olympiad journey is connected to the RobotsMali ecosystem. The experience has helped me develop skills in machine learning, computer vision and NLP while preparing for international competition.
Peer learning & knowledge sharing
I value peer learning and sharing useful resources with other students interested in AI and technical problem-solving. I will add specific activities and outcomes here as they are documented.
08 / EDUCATION
Current focus: school and AI.
I am completing secondary school in Mali while continuing to build my foundations in AI and competitive programming. My priority is to finish the Baccalauréat successfully before taking on larger research commitments.
Terminale TSE (exact sciences), preparing for the Malian Baccalauréat in 2027, with the aim of studying AI, machine learning or software engineering at university.
09 / CV
A concise record of my work.
The download button below allows you to access my curriculum vitae in PDF format.
Note: the PDF file must be uploaded separately; this HTML file does not create a CV automatically.
CONTACT / COLLABORATION
Have a thoughtful project in mind?
For AI, learning opportunities, competitions or technical collaboration, the best place to find my latest public work is GitHub or LinkedIn.