A lot of literature has been dedicated to education in the US. Much of the discussion centers around K-12. But maybe we should be looking beyond K-12 and what is happening at our colleges, especially considering the results of the ACM competition. This is in light of the fact that there is a battle going on in the Internet. Cyber-attacks are pervasive. Many of them originating in China allegedly (more on that later).
The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is a professional organization dedicated to all things related to computers and computing. Once a year, it hosts a competition among colleges and universities world-wide. The competition deals with solving computer-related problems.
MIT is a loser! Rather a bold statement, but when MIT finishes in the "peloton" of a competition related to computers, maybe it is not so outrageous. In fact MIT finished behind Stanford, Cornell and CMU as far as American entries were concerned. Which themselves finished 14th, 15th, and 17th respectively, although they all are listed as 14th.
So who were the winners? Of the top ten, 4 were from China and 4 were from Russia; the remaining two, one was from Ukraine (#4) and the other was from Poland (#8).
While winning competitions is not a predictor of the ability of a nation to deal with the issues of Internet security, it does point out the strength of students and potentially the future workforce for all things Internet. This includes cyber-attacks and cyber-protection.
The Competition
From the news release:
"The contest took place in Harbin, China with 103 teams competing in the final round. Earlier rounds of the competition included 22,000 contestants representing 1,931 universities from 82 countries. The top four teams won Gold medals as well as employment or internship offers from IBM." [http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2010/icpc-2010]
The Results
The Problems
The problems are listed under the first column in pdf (finals problems). [http://cm.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc]
The schools that do well in this contest spend a lot of time preparing for these contests. While it is a skill, it isn't really a good prediction of ability to perform in standard software engineering projects.
ReplyDeleteFor reasons that no one can predict, Middlebury seems to do very well on the exam for a school it's size. It reliably gets to the second hop, at RIT, where they meet up with MIT. MIT usually goes on to the third level, Middlebury usually goes home.