Computer science programming team earns spot at 2020 ICPC North American Championship

CATEGORIES: News, Students

A team of programmers from the Department of Computer Science will advance to the 2020 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) North American Championship after demonstrating their stellar programming abilities during a regional competition.

Competing with 180 groups from the Midwest, the Iowa State team clinched an impressive fourth place after solving six programming problems. Only 55 teams earned a spot to compete for medals, rankings and the title of 2020 ICPC North American Champions.

“I am very grateful that Vahid and Hooman, two Ph.D. students, gave so much time and energy to coaching our teams,” said Simanta Mitra, associate teaching professor and the team’s head coach. “This would not have been possible without our department’s steadfast support.”

The ICPC North American Championship will be held February 19-23 in Atlanta and will be hosted by the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The top performing teams in Atlanta will earn the right to compete in the 2020 ICPC World Finals which will be held in Moscow, Russia this summer.

“It is an honor to provide such intelligent and hard-working students a platform to showcase their abilities,” said Mitra.

Members of the team include: Associate Teaching Professor of computer science and head coach, Simanta Mitra; Seyed-Vahid Sanei-Mehri, assistant coach (Ph.D. ’21 computer engineering); Omar Muhammetkulyyev (’22 software engineering); Ian Gottshall, (’20 software engineering); Takao Shibamoto (’20 computer engineering); Hooman Hashemi, (Ph.D.‘22 computer engineering); and Associate Professor of computer science Gurpur Prabhu, site director.