IT House January 11 news, October 6, 2021, Russia's Nizhny Novgorod State University Valeria Ryabchikova and her two teammates lifted the "Olympiad of programming" - the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) World Championship trophy. Two months later, Valeria joined Huawei's Nizhny Novgorod Institute in Russia to work on accelerated technologies for intelligent computing applications.
▲ The Nizhny Novgorod State University team won the 44th ICPC World Finals in 2021, with Valeria Ryabchikova, third from left in the front row, holding the trophy. Image source: ICPC official website.
According to Huawei, Valeria is 22 years old and graduated from the Institute of Information Science, Mathematical Machinery, Nizhny Novgorod State University. From an early age, Valeria enjoyed solving interesting math puzzles, taking math competitions during elementary school and playing in programming competitions from the 10th grade onwards. After entering college, Valeria continued to compete, and after one competition, she was spotted by Coach Shmelev Alexey, who invited her to join her own ICPC training class.
In 2020, the 44th ICPC was launched with 58,963 entrants from 3,406 universities in 104 countries, including Valeria and her two co-mates. They passed the SEMIFINALS OF THE ICPC Europe North (NCRC) Division and finished second in the region to the World Finals. Due to the pandemic, the 44th ICPC Finals were postponed to October 2021 in Moscow, with 118 teams participating live. After 5 hours of intense competition, the Valeria team was the only team to successfully solve 12 questions and win the ICPC Championship Trophy. Referring to the race, Valeria said: "I was very nervous during the race, I was completely unprepared when I heard the result, I couldn't believe it all really happened. ”
Valeria's coach Shmelev Alexey joined Huawei's Nizhny Novgorod Institute in May 2021. He insists on doing ICPC training for his students outside of work, and the Institute is very supportive of this, providing Alexey and the students with training venues and some help in their ability. Influenced by Alexey, Valeria approached Huawei during her university years and officially joined the Nizhny Novgorod Institute on December 21, 2021, working on accelerating technology for intelligent computing applications.
Valeria is both nervous and excited about her future work: "I love solving puzzles and finding pleasure in them. Hopefully I can create value for the company. ”
▲ The Nizhny Novgorod State University team passed the 45th ICPC Regional Semifinals and entered the World Finals. First from left: Coach Shmelev Alexey, second from left: Valeria Ryabchikova, fourth from left: Ilya Khlyustov. Image source: Nizhny Novgorod State University website.
IT House learned that Valeria joined Huawei on the same day as a young ICPC semifinal winner, Ilya Khlyustov. Ilya, 20, a student at Nizhny Novgorod State University and a new teammate of Valeria, has made it to the 45th ICPC Regional Semifinals for the World Finals in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in November 2022.
Ilya used to think that Huawei was just an IT company, but after he learned that Huawei has a lot of research institutes, he became interested in Huawei. Ilya believes: "Working in a large company like Huawei will have the opportunity to influence the process of technological development. So he joined the Nizhny Novgorod Institute with Valeria, where he will work on algorithms and machine learning.
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ICPC trivia
ICPC is the world's largest and highest level of international collegiate programming design competition, known as the "Olympic Games of programming". Nearly 60,000 students from more than 3,000 universities in more than 100 countries compete each year, and only the best teams can enter the world finals, and the winning college students are recognized as the best programming talents in the world.
ICPC is also known as the hardest-core race, scored not by humans, but by computers. Three members of each team, with only 1 computer, need to solve 7 to 13 problems in 5 hours using one of the programs in C/C++, Java, and Python, such as optimizing subway schedules, simulating air traffic control, tracking robot movements, simulating airport baggage collection, estimating oil reserves, and more. When a question is solved, the team submits it to the evaluator, which determines whether it is correct. If the submitted program does not work correctly, it will be returned to the participating team, which can modify it and submit the issue again.
Interestingly, after each team has completed a question correctly, the organizer will raise a balloon representing the color of the question in its position, and the first team to solve it for each question will receive an additional "FIRST PROBLEM SOLVED" balloon.
Huawei has been sponsoring ICPC since 2012, and in addition to sponsoring regional competitions and finals, Huawei will also cooperate with ICPC to hold unit challenges, marathon competitions, and training camps. Huawei selects representative, practical, and challenging topics from within the business to support students to learn, explore cutting-edge industrial knowledge, and participate in innovative thinking in the digital world.