Programming Team Competes with Honors at International Contest

A University of Texas at Dallas student team, Whoosh, placed in the honors category at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals, a competition known as the Olympics of computing.

Team Whoosh was one of 139 teams from 103 countries and one of 19 teams in North America to qualify for the global competition. The three-student UT Dallas team placed 69th internationally at the 49th annual competition held Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 at ADA University in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The team includes recent computer science graduate Suraj Mathashery BS’25, and Quang Ngo and George Zhang, computer science seniors in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

ICPC competitions task students with designing and implementing algorithms to solve 10 to 15 challenging problems in five hours. Success requires expertise in problem-solving; advanced algorithms and data structures; mathematics; abstract thinking; and programming languages. Team Whoosh solved six problems in the ICPC World Finals.

The Comets advanced from regional and national competitions, finishing 18th in the 2025 ICPC North America Championship in May in Orlando, Florida.

Qualifying for the world finals is an honor, said Bhadrachalam Chitturi PhD’07, professor of instruction in computer science and the team’s coach.

“About 3,300 universities across the globe compete for a place in the world finals,” Chitturi said. “We are proud of our team for earning the honor of representing North America in the ICPC World Finals.”

The team was formed through Codeburners, a UT Dallas club dedicated to algorithmic problem-solving.

“Students worked diligently on hard problems in myriad domains for years to hone their problem-solving skills to earn this honor,” Chitturi said. “We are proud of our team’s accomplishment.”

UT Dallas teams also qualified for the ICPC World Finals in 2007, 2020, 2021 and 2023.

A version of this article appears in News Center.