A UTCS programming team finished second at this year’s ACM-International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) regional competition. The team of Arnay Sastry, Jaime Rivera, and Josh Slocum beat over 60 different teams competing in South Central U.S region of the contest. 

ACM-ICPC is an annual programming competition among universities all over the world. The contest, sponsored by IBM and headquartered at Baylor University, hosts more 2,300 universities from over 90 countries across six continents every year. 

A total of four UT teams entered the competition and all finished within the top 25. Out of nine problems the teams solved five, four, three and two problems respectively. The highest number of problems solved by any team was five, with nearly 40 percent of the teams being able to solve none of the problems. 

The UTCS teams are sponsored and organized by faculty members Glenn Downing, Vallath Nandakumar and Shyamal Mitra. Additionally, David Wahler, who is a UTCS alum now working at Indeed, coaches them. 

The first place team from Rice University will continue on to the world finals in Morocco in 2015, with a chance of the second place UT team going as well.

All UT students that participate in the competition include: Robert Faulk, Veronica Gunn, Connor Hitt, Thomas Lam, Jonathan Lee, Theodore Popp, Naeem Quddus, Daniel Talamas, and Kevin You.