KOLLAM: The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Asia regional contest 2010 will be held on Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham campuses at Amritapuri and Ettimadai, and at IIT Kanpur on December 11 and 12.
Amrita School of Engineering principal Dr.Sankaran, ICPC contest director Dr.Nandakumar Vallath and Amrita School of Engineering assistant professor M Krishnakumar told a news conference here on Friday that the regional contest would serve as a platform for Asian students to meet, establish friends and promote fair competition in programming and give an opportunity to demonstrate and sharpen their problem-solving and computing skills.
The contest is regarded as the ‘Olympics of computer programming’, they said. ICPC is an annual multi-tiered computer programming competition among the universities of the world. The preliminary round is an online contest in which students can participate from their colleges. The second round is the regional contest and last round is the world finals. This time, the world finals will be held at Cairo in Egypt from February 27 to March 4, 2011. Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham is hosting this competition in a multi-site manner with one venue on the Amritapuri campus and another on the Ettimadai campus, Coimbatore. This is the sixth time that Amrita is hosting this prestigious contest and the first time as a multi-site event. The multi-site event is managed by A-View software developed inhouse.
There are 135 teams contesting at Amrita. 81 teams, including teams from China, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka will be participating in the contest. Teams from IITs, NITs, IIITs and other prestigious institutions are among the teams from India. 10 teams from Kerala, including three teams from Amrita will participate. Last time, four teams from India were selected to the finals.
They said the contest would help motivate students from the State and enhance their problem-solving skills and excel in computer programming, which would in turn help them to bag software jobs in big organisations. Earlier winners of the competition had bagged placements in various multinational companies, including Facebook.
The contest at Amrita is sponsored by IBM, Directi and Infosys. Founder and CEO of Directi Bhavan Turakhia, IBM University Relations head Sudar Oli and senior officials of Infosys will arrive to watch the contest and participate in the valedictory function.
The formal inauguration will be held at 11.30 a.m. on Saturday.
Amrita Vishwa Vidyalaya Vice-Chancellor Dr.Venkata Rangan, Ettimadai campus professor Dr.Gangadharan and Amritapuri HoD Dr. Kaimal will deliver lectures. Swami Abhayamrita Chaithanya will preside. Valedictory will be held on Sunday.
The contest is organised under the aegis of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), world’s first scientific and educational computing society. Founded in 1947 and headquartered in New York, ACM has more than 92,000 memberships across the world. The contest is sponsored by IBM and controlled by Baylor University, Texas.