EEG Foundation Challenge win!

Happy to share that our team MBZUAI (Anuar Aimoldin, Ayana Mussabayeva, and Yedige Mussabayev) took the absolute first place (by combined metric) in the EEG Foundation Challenge, part of the NeurIPS Competition Track 2025!

The challenge consisted of two tasks:

1. Prediction of reaction time from stimulus-locked EEG: where we reframed the problem as temporal segmentation to localize the response event.

2. Prediction of the externalizing factor from EEG (a mental-health-related construct representing a common dimension of psychopathology across disorders)

The final metric combined results from both tasks (30 % Task 1 + 70 % Task 2).

As winners, we were invited to have a spotlight talk at NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego!

Though I have long experience in machine learning and brain data analysis, this was actually my first ever ML competition, and damn what an experience it’s been! Throughout October, we dedicated nearly every day to this challenge: experimenting, analyzing, learning, and pushing boundaries. Our success wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing balance of our team: from research depth to Kaggle-hardened competition strategy (including a great Kaggle master among us).

So, seems like now I'm going to the U.S. again (third time this year and second time this month). So after using all those lagged correlation features, I guess it’s only fair I’m gonna get lots of jet lag myself!