NU Wins 2013 Mid-Central USA International Collegiate Programming Contest

The Wildcats were the only team to solve all 8 problems in the competition. The contest involved 139 teams from a five-state region.

ICPC TeamThe Wildcats, a Northwestern University team consisting of EECS students Ed Kim, Zeyu Wang and Siyuan Cai, won 1st place in the 2013 ACM ICPC Mid-Central USA Programming Contest held at the University of Chicago on Saturday, November 2, 2013.

The Wildcats were the only team to solve all 8 problems in the competition. The contest involved 139 teams from a five-state region.

Northwestern’s other team, Team Ashe, featuring Chunxiao Diao, Yifei Yang, and Aiqi Xie, also did very well, placing 12th regionally (the top 9%). Both teams are coached by Peter A. Dinda, Professor.

In placing so highly, both the Wildcats and Ashe defeated some stellar competition, including teams from the University of Chicago, Washington University in Saint Louis, and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

The WIldcats will be one of about 80 teams worldwide that will be in the 2014 ACM-ICPC World Finals, hosted at Ural Federal University Ekaterinburg, Russia on June 22-26 and sponsored by IBM. By competing in the contest, the Wildcats have entered the elite echelon of the top 1% of the teams in the world.

The 2013 Official Scoreboard shows the rankings of all teams.

ACM 2013The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), which has been held since 1977 is It is held under the aegis of Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) – the world’s largest and oldest international organization that operates at the highest levels of the field of computer sciences.

In 2012 ICPC involved 29,479 students from 2,322 universities, which represents 91 countries from around the world.   The winners and participants of ICPC are some of the most desirable employees in the world’s best computer companies. A previous incarnation of the WIldcats won the regional competitions of 2006 and 2007, going to Tokyo, Japan and Banff, Canada for their world competitions. These NU alums are currently at Microsoft, Facebook, and a startup called Imo.Im.

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