This year IEEEXtreme 16.0 was held on the 22nd of October 2022 from UTC 00:00 am to the 23rd of October, UTC 00:00 am. This 24-hour programming competition was held entirely online. A total of 12 teams from Brac University participated in the competition this year.
Brac University is under Region 10 on the map of IEEE. It was witnessed that this year 54% of sign-ups for the competition were from Bangladesh and Brac University was one of the leading universities whose IEEE members and graduate students participated. The proctor from our university was our respected Annajiat Alim Rasel sir, who monitored the participation of students and the scoreboard throughout the competition.
The Judges of this event were Dr. Jeremy Blum (Pennsylvania State University), Prof. Oded Margalit (Citi’s University), Dr. Nikolaos S. Papaspyrou (Google- Germany), Kuida Liu (TuSimple), Douglas Gischlar (IEEE), Zhiruo Zhou (University of Southern California), Bryan Cipriano Tarazona (NEORIS), Alfonsus Raditya Arsadjaja (Dekoruma).
Speaking about the Executive Committee, we had Luis Fernandes as Committee Chair, George Michael as Committee Vice Chair, Dr. Jeremy Blum as Technical Lead, Adwaith S as Public Relations Lead, Craig Scratchley as Rules Lead, John Benedict Boggala as Sponsorship lead, Omar Bishtawri as Webmaster, Robert Sacks as IEEE Staff, Program Specialist and Student Activist, Dimitrios Lyras as Advisory Member, Prasanth Mohan as Advisory Member, Monika Bhole as Counseling Member, Dr. Heba Hassan as Consulting Member, Henan Nina Hanco as Consulting Member.
To make this event successful, it was divided into 10 regions along with a design team with skilled IEEE Members. Speaking about the design team, we had Sahabzada Betab Badar as Design Team Lead, Remajothi S as Design Team Co-Lead, Mihin Himsara Kariyawasam, Gerardo Martinez, Md. Moynul Islam, Mehammed Shabeeb Kt, Krishna Varshney, Mohammad Rahman, and Vaishnav S in the Design team.
How were the problems formed? The tasks are developed and judged by our respected judge panel. Amm entrants agree and acknowledge the fact that the sponsor is the owner of all tasks and the associated code. Entrants further agreed that they won’t without written permission from the sponsor, use the tasks or any associated code for any reason other than the event. The panel of judges was made up of higher-grade IEEE members from both academic and industrial backgrounds. Tasks were categorized as easy, medium, hard, and hardest to assist teams of all experience levels to participate and help them prioritize the order in which they would resolve said tasks.
An individual task was answered in any of the supported programming languages, which are indicated at a specific URL : (currently https://csacademy.com/about/environment/). All the tasks had time and memory limitations, and it was also possible that certain programming languages would have a different time limit to adjust for factors such as virtual machine overhead.
We talked with some participants about their experience in the competition. According to them, the problems were standard enough with sufficient time, and they had a nice experience participating in the contest. Almost all of the teams had 3 members. Regarding signing up, contestants got almost 1.5 months for signing up and the procedure was easy to complete. Participants did not face any difficulties during the competition. The difficulty level of the questions was an average of 4.5 out of 5. And the overall experience among the participants was 5 out of 5 and they were satisfied with the event. One thing participants suggested was that organizers should provide prizes who ranked well in the region section.
This competition was created to provide IEEE Student Members and Graduate Student members with an interesting IEEE activity, giving competitors an opportunity to embrace teamwork- which is an important skill to develop for career success. And lastly to increase awareness among IEEE students around the IEEE core activities related to information and technology topics.