Success for our students in two international competitions

Students from this Department have been successful in two prestigious contests - the International Collegiate Programming Competition World Finals, and the Country-2-Country Capture The Flag cybersecurity competition.

A team including Maja Trela (above, second from left, a 4th-year undergraduate here) and Kacper Walentynowicz (third from left, above, a 2021 graduate now studying for a PhD) jointly took the silver medal at the World Finals of the 44th International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) in Moscow. They were up against 116 other teams from institutions around the world, and took the silver jointly with three other teams.

The team coach Andrej Ivašković (above, far right), who is studying for a PhD here, says: "The Cambridge team did extremely well. They came in sixth and received silver medals, beating teams from several universities that have won ICPC in past years. The team also received a special prize for being the first team to solve problem A at the contest, a mere 27 minutes from the start of the contest. This is an amazing result, the best Cambridge has ever achieved at ICPC. I am very proud of our team."

This contest (formerly known as the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest) is the oldest, largest and most prestigious programming contest in the world. It draws teams from over 2,000 universities - many of them entering more than one team - across 80 countries. These teams are then whittled down in the regional rounds with only the winners going on to the ICPC World Finals.

The silver medal at these World Finals isn't the only competition success enjoyed by students in this Department.

Other students were also victorious in the recent 2021 Country-2-Country Capture The Flag cybersecurity competition. Participants from this Department featured in the gold, silver and bronze medal-winning teams at the event, and in the first, second, third and fourth Honorary Award-winning teams. It is the second year running that our students have featured in the top three teams at this event, an accomplishment that no other participating university has equalled in either year.

PhD student Dimitrije Erdeljan was the highest-scoring individual during the qualifiers and finished in the gold medal-winning team. Samuel Wedgwood was in the silver-medal winning team, and Fredrik Ekholm in the bronze-medal winning team.

At the event – run to encourage more young people to consider careers in cyber security – competitors were placed in mixed teams with fellow competitors they didn’t know, and had to work together to solve a series of challenges in areas including reverse engineering, cryptography and forensics.

The Country-2-Country contest – originally called Cambridge-2-Cambridge - was created in 2015 by Frank Stajano, Professor of Privacy and Security here in the Department along with Dr Howie Shrobe and Lori Glover JD of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The competition is now being run by INCS-COE.

Congratulation to our students for doing so well at both these highly competitive events.

• Picture courtesy of Andrej Ivašković.