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A Lafayette student team took first place at a regional site competition in the International Collegiate Programming Contest held Nov. 13 by the Association of Computing Machinery.
Besting competitors from Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and other institutions at the Wilkes University site were electrical and computer engineering major Oliver Bowen ’05 (Johannesburg, South Africa), computer science major Stephen Kelley ’05 (Mansfield, Mass.), and mathematics major Zachary Reiter ’07 (Easton, Pa.).
The squad ranked tenth overall among 161 teams competing at nine sites in the Mid-Atlantic region. In 38th place was the team of Farhan Ahmed ’05, who is pursuing a B.S. electrical and engineering degree and A.B. with a major in mathematics; Konstantinos Bousmalis ’05 (Thessanoliki, Greece), who is pursuing a B.S. computer science degree and A.B. with a major in mathematics; and computer science major Mayank Lahiri ’05(Muscat, Oman).
The combined score of the two teams gave the College an overall finish of sixth place among the 73 schools competing in the region. Last year, Lafayette’s teams combined to finish fifth overall.
“The students worked very well together and they came very close to qualifying for the world championships to be held in Shanghai, China, since the top four teams overall qualify,” says team adviser Chun Wai Liew, assistant professor of computer science. “This is the second year that we have finished in the top ten overall and it shows the quality of the students and the program as we are competing against teams from large research universities — University of Virginia, Duke University, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, etc.”
In other recent news demonstrating Lafayette’s strength in computer science, Joseph Crobak ’06, a computer science major from Mechanicsburg, Pa., became one of fewer than 20 students in the nation to receive a scholarship this year from Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the international computer science honor society.
Lafayette is the only institution to have three students in four years earn a UPE scholarship within the past eight years or more — and perhaps the only college or university since the scholarship program began in 1985 — according to Orlando Madrigal, international secretary of UPE.