Team Won Local Competition, Placed Second Overall in Mid-Central Region

After winning a local competition last month, a team of computer science students at DePaul University was invited this week to compete in the world finals of the 30th annual International Collegiate Programming Contest, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IBM.

The International Collegiate Programming Contest is a year-long competition, in which teams of three students rely on their programming skills and mental endurance to solve complex, real-world problems and then implement the answers into software programs in a timed, deadline situation. Teams that solve the most of nine offered problems correctly are the winners, with ties broken by determining which teams solved the problems in the least amount of time. The world finals are being held April 9-13 in San Antonio, Texas.

Regional competitions were held at nearly 150 sites in 71 countries worldwide, and more than 5,000 university teams participated from around the world. DePaul’s team, known as the "DePaul Monks," won their regional site competition at the university’s Loop Campus on Nov. 5, finishing ahead of 11 other teams at the site, including squads from the University of Chicago, Loyola University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, Wheaton College and Valparaiso University.

The DePaul Monks correctly solved seven of the nine problems, good for second place overall out of 124 teams from nearly 70 universities in the Mid-Central Region (which includes teams from Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi). DePaul finished ahead of such schools as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Vanderbilt University in the regional competition.

DePaul’s showing made it possible for them to be one of the 80 teams invited to the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, where teams from around the globe will compete for awards, prizes, scholarships and bragging rights to the "World’s Smartest Trophy."

DePaul was invited to the championship round alongside only 16 other U.S. universities, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Princeton University, Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University, California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Rice University, Washington University in St. Louis and Georgia Institute of Technology.

"I’m very proud of this team," said Iyad Kanj, assistant professor in DePaul’s School of Computer Science, Telecommunication and Information Systems (CTI) and coach of the DePaul Monks. "To be successful in this competition, you not only have to be a skillful problem-solver from a mathematical standpoint, but you also have to be a very good and very fast programmer in order to implement the solutions."

Four DePaul CTI students make up the Monks: undergraduate computer science majors Peter Chan and Cosmin Stejerean, and graduate computer science students Dominic Battre and Tim Gebhardt. Gebhardt is the team’s reserve member. The students’ performance in the contest is a reflection of a year’s worth of preparation and training, said Kanj.

DePaul CTI is one of the most innovative and wide-ranging computer science programs in the country. The undergraduate program enrolls more than 1,100 students and offers 12 different degrees. Approximately 2,000 students are enrolled in its 18 graduate programs. CTI also features a doctoral degree program in computer science. For more information, visit: www.cti.depaul.edu.

DePaul is the largest Catholic university in the United States and one of the nation’s ten largest private universities. A richly diverse population of 23,148 students attends classes on two city and four suburban campuses.