HCM CITY  — The 26th Vietnamese Information Technology (IT) Olympiad and the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) for the Asian region opened in HCM City yesterday.

The opening ceremony was organised by the HCM City University of Education (HCMUE) in collaboration with the Việt Nam Association for Information Processing (VAIP) and the Việt Nam Student’s Association.

After the regional contest, the top 36 teams will take part in the international competition at Beijing University in May next year.

More than 380 Vietnamese students from 64 universities and colleges are attending the Olympiad.

The 2017 ACM/ICPC Asia HCM regional contest includes 444 students in 148 teams, including 125 Vietnamese teams and 23 international teams from 14 universities from Japan, China, Thailand, South of Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and Taiwan.

The ICPC is a multitier, team-based competition for outstanding students in computing that promotes creativity, teamwork and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure.

Its participation has grown to tens of thousands of the finest students and faculty in computing disciplines at about 3,000 universities from over 100 countries on six continents.

Speaking at the ceremony, the vice principal of HCMUE, Dr. Nguyễn Thị Minh Hồng, said the ICPC contest had played an important role in providing IT staff for 25 years.

“The ICPC is the biggest mathematics contest and a playground for computing students. It gives them a chance to improve their skills and offers them an opportunity to show themselves to the worldwide IT community,” she said

Speaking at the event was Dr. Trần Việt Hùng, founder of Got It Inc., which created a mobile app designed to organise the world’s brainpower and called Knowledge-as-a-Service. The app offers on-demand help for users in bite-size knowledge-time units.

“Software engineers play an important role in any IT team or company,” said Hùng, who has experience working in Silicon Valley in the US.

He said that he hopes Vietnamese students become global engineers in the future, and to achieve that aim, he urged them to improve their foreign language skills and to continually update their knowledge.

HCM City is one of the 18 sites for the ACM/ICPC – Asia regional contest this year.

At the ceremony, organisers presented awards to winners of the online ACM/ICPC contest held in the south, central and northern areas in October, and the national ACM/ICPC contest last month, which attracted more than 2,000 students. — VNS