With an immense pleasure, it is an honor to inform that UMT team has qualified for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) finals to be held at South Dakota, USA.
The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a multitier, team-based, programming competition operating under the sponsorship of ACM and headquartered at Baylor University (https://icpc.baylor.edu/). This contest involves a global network of universities hosting regional competitions that lead teams to ACM-ICPC World Final. Participation in this contest has grown to tens of thousands finest students and faculty in computing disciplines from over 102 countries including 2736 universities. This contest promotes creativity, teamwork and innovation in building new software programs and enables students to test their ability under pressure. It the oldest and largest computer programming contest in the world which has been organized annually, since 1970. ACM provides seed money to organize the regional contest for each country, whereas IBM has been sponsoring this event for several years. UMT Lahore, organized the regional contest for Pakistan Region in November 2016. Apart from ACM and IBM, honourable Rector UMT, Dr. Hasan Sohaib Murad readily approved a substantial financial support for this event. The event held in 2 legs, where in the first leg more than 400 participant teams from all across the country participated from their home cities in an online programming competition round. This helped in shortlisting almost 100 top teams for the second leg of the event which was organized at UMT Lahore campus on 27th and 28th November, 2016. More than 100 such regional contests are organized in all designated regions by ACM. Whereas, all the regional champion teams qualify and compete for World Champions in World Finals every year.
The teams register through an online portal managed by Baylor University. The regional events are organized by Regional Directors under the well-defined rules laid down by ACM. Dr. M. Umar Suleman, a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science, at UMT, is currently the regional director for Pakistan Region. The Department of Computer Science at UMT took this initiative to organize this event with the consent of Dean SST, Dr. Shaukat Iqbal Kamboh, and under the leadership of Dr. Adnan Abid as the head of the event, who managed to organize this event with the help of a dedicated team involving faculty, students, and staff from several different departments of the university.
The competition was this years biggest ever computer programming competition in the history of Pakistan, which was not only successfully organized by UMT, Lahore, but was also won by hardworking students of the same institution. According to the rules of this contest, this winning team along with their mentor will participate in the World Final going to be organized between 20-25 May at Rapid City, South Dakota, USA.
The UMT team comprising of Mr. Abdul Rehman, Mr. Syed Zeeshan Ali, and Mr. Awab Ahmad from UMT, Lahore was declared to be the Champion of this Regional Contest. The team was mentored by Mr. Nabeel Sabir Khan, a dedicated faculty member from the Department of Computer Science at UMT. Whereas, 2 teams from FAST Karachi secured 2nd and 3rd positions.
We wish our UMT Team (The Stars) best of luck for the ACM (ICPC) Finals with the hope that our students will make us proud once again.