UT Dallas CS Team Qualify to Compete in the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals in Egypt
A team of three University of Texas at Dallas computer science students has qualified to compete in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals in Egypt in November.
The students ranked 12th in the ICPC North America Championship in May. The team scored higher than any other Texas university team and finished alongside teams from the nation’s top-ranked computer science programs — ahead of the University of California, Berkeley and one spot below Harvard University.
The UT Dallas team, “Whoosh,” includes junior Suraj Mathashery and seniors Evan Bailey and Mike Nguyen.
ICPC competitions task students with designing and implementing algorithms to solve 10 to 15 increasingly challenging problems in five hours. Success requires expertise in problem-solving, advanced algorithms and data structures, mathematics, abstract thinking and programming languages.
The students on UTD’s team, one of few to answer eight or more questions in the national competition, prepared by competing in weekly competitions through Codeburners, a student organization dedicated to programming competitions, said Bhadrachalam Chitturi PhD’07, the team’s coach, ICPC site director at UT Dallas and associate professor of instruction in computer science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.
“They had good math backgrounds and were very serious,” Chitturi said. “They started working together slowly, and they gelled.”
In fact, Mathashery and Bailey, both National Merit Scholars, also competed on a separate UT Dallas Putnam Club team in December that ranked No. 32 among 456 university teams in the 83rd annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, considered to be one of the world’s most challenging mathematics competitions.
“Supporting the Codeburners will continue to be important to UTD’s success in future ICPC seasons,” Bailey said.
The students advanced from regional and national competitions. Whoosh was the lone team to advance from the South Central USA competition, hosted by UT Dallas, in February.
“We practiced often as a team to establish good teamwork and cooperation during the competition,” Mathashery said. “We have a wide range of skills among the three of us that enabled us to solve a majority of the problems.”
One of the keys was determining how to leverage each other’s strengths.
“I believe that one of the most critical factors that contributed to our success in the national competition is the fact that each member of our team solved the problems that are closely related to their strong suit,” Nguyen said.
Source | UT Dallas News Center
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 4,000 bachelors-degree students, more than 1,010 master’s students, 140 Ph.D. students, 52 tenure-track faculty members, and 42 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2022. With the University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.