Coders compete in Hollywood challenge

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- The red carpet may be rolled up, but Hollywood was still buzzing Tuesday as students from around the world gathered to flex their brainpower at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) World Finals.

In conjunction with IBM, the ACM kicked off its International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), welcoming more than 200 of the computing world's best and brightest to compete for champion status.

The 27th annual competition has brought together 70 teams from universities in 26 countries from around the globe to solve complex problems designed by ACM judges. Tuesday morning, teams of three students combined their intellect to design software solutions to eight problems, all within a five-hour deadline.

Having sponsored the event for six years, IBM has more than philanthropy in mind. The company is often actively seeking new talent, and it holds contest competitors in very high regard.

Helene Armitage, vice president of technology at IBM, told competitors Sunday that the company has spent the past 50 years developing through six orders of magnitude, and it's looking to the next generation to fulfill the next six orders.

"This time is critical," Armitage said. "It is not just about faster, better computing. It is about more intelligent, reliable computing. It is about taking complexity and making it simple and consumable to users."

IBM is also investing more than dollars and cents into the next generation of programmers. The company offers scholarship and internship programs, including its Extreme Blue program. Extreme Blue is a project-focused internship that pairs three to four computer science students with an MBA intern, along with business and technical mentors from IBM. The computer science interns write code for their projects, while the business students focus on the project business case and market analysis.

In past years, Extreme Blue teams have been responsible for projects like developing applications on the IBM WebSphere Telecom Application Server, as well as creating VoiceXML development tools, now part of IBM's WebSphere Voice Toolkit.

John Wolpert, senior engineering manager of the Extreme Blue IBM Austin Lab, said the ACM finals are a good opportunity for students to show off their skills and give former students a chance to come back and coach or mentor competitors. He noted that an important asset to have on a resume is volunteering and spending time encouraging other people to get into computer science.

"What I want to see on a resume is someone going to local schools for mentoring," Wolpert said. "I want people to say 'What I do iscool.' I will look a lot harder at someone's resume that shows that."

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