For Immediate Release 18 January 1996
HKUST’S COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENTS
TO COMPETE WITH WORLD’S BEST
Already ranked in the top 5% of the world’s student computer programmers,
the
HKUST proInternational SC elastic Programming Finals fc amming team will bid for an even higher spot at the ACM Pennsylvania, on 17 February. to be held in Philadelphia,
As third place winners at the 1995 ACM Far East Regional Contest held in Taipei on 5 November, the HKUST team earned a spot at the finals.
finals. This is the second year for the HKUST team to compete at the international “Our students have shown once again that they’re among the best computer programmers in East Asia,” says their coach, Dr Michael Stiber. “This was the second time that we went up against Asian teams from outside Hong Kong. The first time, we were very successful. This time confirmed that it wasn’t a fluke. After all, almost any team can be lucky on a particular day with particular questions. Winning consistently is another thing.”
This year’s regional contests worldwide saw 800 university teams bidding for a place among the top 40 to compete at the finals.
Ken Wong Win Kin., Chesney Wong and Vincent Ip Ting Pang will compete in the finals and Ngan Sai Fong will go to the competition as an alternate. All four are computer science students.
The team is aiming to do better than their very respectable showing at last year’s finals, where they beat teams from traditional heavyweights like Stanford and Columbia to place 13th in a field of 38.
ACM stands for the Association for Computing Machinery. It is the leading professional society in computer science.
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