U-planner will sponsor the second regional version of the International Collegiate Programming Contest in Chile, to gather the most promising programmers in Latin American higher education institutions. The event is locally organized by Programación Competitiva (Progcomp) and to be held at the Universidad de La Serena, from 18 to 27 July 2016.

“Once a year these Olympics are executed where students from all over Chile compete in algorithmic problems and the winner then has the opportunity to participate at the world championship,” says Sebastián Flores, Head of Data Science at U-Planner. “For us, it is a very important event because the best programmers of the country meet here.”

Sebastián underlines that this is the first time that a Chilean software company sponsors the event, which has been held around the world with the sponsorship of technological companies such as IBM, Facebook, Microsoft and Google.

About the ACM-ICPC

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) is an international programming competition, where teams of students from different higher education institutions meet worldwide. The event is annually coordinated by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IBM. 

How does it work?

To ACM, the goal is “Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession.”

“We see a world where computing helps solve tomorrow’s problems – where we use our knowledge and skills to advance the profession and make a positive impact,” according to its official site.

The free competition gathers students from the entire region, preselected in internal contests within their higher education institutions. The week will have classes, workshops and seminars about algorithms and data structures following the world event topic guidelines, as well as gathering people in real-time competitive drills and discussion sessions.

Every step of the competition, the three-membered teams work with a single computer.

• - Upon entering the contest, teams face a number of mathematical problems with the goal of solving the highest amount them in the least amount of time.
• - The challenge and interest of the problems lead to the application of algorithms and data structures of different complexities, in situations that need mathematical abstraction skills.

The week is part of a series of regional meetings around the world:

• - 13 camps in the USA and Canada
• - 1 in the South Pacific
• - 5 in Europe
• - 4 in Asia & Pacific
• - 5 in Latin America
  • - México & Central America
  • - Caribbean
  • - Northern South America
  • - Brazil
  • - Southern South America

As of July, over 28,000 teams have joined the different regional groups, 200 which should be defined in Southern South America, where Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, and Uruguay teams compete. The winners can go to a world championship: in 2016, it was held in Thailand; in 2017, it will be held in South Dakota, in the United States.

U-Planner’s professional projections

For the company, helping the development of future programmers in the region is highly significant, as they want to show that local software companies are an excellent job prospect. "These talented young people go to work to the largest technology corporations or study a Ph.D. overseas where they are recruited before leaving school,” Sebastián Flores says.  

Hence, they are interested in demonstrating how it is possible to pursue a successful career in education technology companies,  in areas such as Machine Learning to improve student retention, are an interesting proposal to these young computer geniuses. 

For more information, you can access http://campamento2016.progcomp.cl/