Strategies to Crack Coding Hackathons – 26 Nov 2020, 5 PM 🗓

Professional Development Session

November 26, 2020 | Thursday | 5 PM

Hackathons are well-established in today’s world and have proven to be very popular for a variety of reasons among students, graduates, professionals and other tech enthusiasts.

Hackathons are one or more day-long events, during which enthusiasts solve technology challenges. The business companies and sponsors usually organize these challenges with an aim of recruiting talent for IT-related work while simultaneously transforming the promising prototypes into finalised products. In a hackathon, the time limit requires participants to distil their visionary ideas down to actionable alternatives.

IEEEXtreme is one such global hackathon challenge in which teams of IEEE Student members – advised and proctored by an IEEE member, and often supported by an IEEE Student Branch – compete in a 24-hour time span against each other to solve a set of programming problems. This professional development session of ISDAIOT 2020 presents an opportunity for knowledge sharing from the winning Xtreme 14.0 participants of the Victorian Section on tips to crack coding hackathons.

Panel Members

Panel Moderator: Ifrah Saeed, Graduate Researcher, University of Melbourne

IFRAH SAEED is a second-year PhD student at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne. Previously, she received her master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, United States and the University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, Pakistan respectively. She worked in the software industry for a year before her master’s and then associated herself with academia after her master’s degree. She is the Chair of Women in Engineering Student Affinity Group at the University of Melbourne and the Women in Engineering coordinator at IEEE Industry Applications Society, Victorian Section. She has been programming for more than a decade and loves to promote coding for STEM challenges.

Panelist: Ali Toosi, Computer Science Graduate, Monash University

ALI TOOSI is a Computer Science Graduate from Monash University. During his time of study, he has been involved in quite a few competitive programming challenges both as contestant and organizer. That includes competing in a couple of IEEEXtremes and a few more of others like Codeforces. He is a part of MuMonash team at IEEE Xtreme 14.0 which ranked 67 globally and first in the IEEE Victorian Section. Ali has also been a problem setter and organizer for a few competitions inside Monash University namely, Digital Health Contest, Monash Collegiate Programming Contest etc.

Panelist: Jackson Goerner, Honors Graduate – Mathematics, Monash University

JACKSON GOERNER recently finished an Honours Degree in Pure Mathematics at Monash University. This year is the second time he has competed in IEEEXtreme as a part of MuMonash team which ranked 67 globally and topped among the teams at the IEEE Victorian section. He has additional competing experience of three years from other contests like Simon Marais Mathematics Competition and International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). He has been programming in python for half a decade now and has also organised a few contests at Monash University. He is mainly interested in combinatorics, programming, robotics, and any union of these topics.

Panelist: Jared Collette, Graduate Researcher, University of Melbourne

JARED COLLETTE is a final-year PhD student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Melbourne. He works on the mechanotransduction feedback of polarity in cell migration under the supervision of Dr Vijay Rajagopal. Using computational techniques in continuum mechanics, he explores underlying mechanisms of cell signalling and mechanics that give new insights into changes of individual cell behaviour and dynamics. Aside from his PhD, Jared is beginning to be involved in Coding Hackathons. IEEEXtreme 14.0 was his first major competition, where he was placed fourth in the Victorian Section as a solo competitor. He has an extensive programming background ranging from Python, Matlab, C, C++, and Fortran. He has been exposed to non-competitive coding challenges online, such as on CodinGame, and retrospectively analysed the Google Code Jam coding problems since 2014. Jared will continue to take his extensive mathematical and programming background for many future competitions.

Panelist: Dr Miao Sun, Academic Researcher, University of Melbourne

MIAO SUN, recently graduated with a doctoral degree from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Melbourne in 2019. Her research interests include Silicon Photonics, Plasmonics, Optoelectronic devices, and Optical communication. She received the prestigious Women in Photonics Travel Grant established by IEEE Women in Photonics initiative to deliver an oral talk on the 2017 IEEE Photonics Conference in Orlando, Florida, USA. Without too much programming involvement in her past study (mainly MATLAB), this is the first time for her to join a coding competition and her team, TripleAI ranked third in the Victorian Section. She opines that IEEEXtreme is a great opportunity to quickly learn the basic coding skill in a short time span, also opening new possibilities for future work. Recently, she has been interested in honing data analytics and machine learning using Python.