Santa Barbara City College’s computer programming teams turned in successful performances in the 2019 Southern California Regionals for the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) on Saturday November 9th in Riverside, CA, including First Runner Up amongst two year schools in the competition.

The top team, consisting of Monica Aguilar, Nhan Le, and Jianlyu Mao, outscored teams from a number of four year universities, including Cal Tech, UCI, UCLA, UCR and UCSD.

Other SBCC teams also competed successfully at the event, outranking teams from universities and colleges located throughout the Southern California region. Their members included Ben Akely, Abdul Alkhattari, Selah Argent, Rafael Carrillo, John Ericson, Jack Ferrone, Elliot Gerlach, Nhan Le, Reid Madock, Jianlyu Mao, Estela Ramirez, Piero Trujillo, Tys vanZeyl, Wade Varesio, Josh Villanueva, Lihong Wu and Zack Zerman.

The ICPC challenges three-person student teams to solve a set of ten programming problems in five hours. This year, 88 teams from 24 institutions in the Southern California region competed. The competiton's first place team, from Cal Tech, solved nine problems in five hours. The Cal Tech team will compete in the ICPC World Finals to be held in Moscow, Russia, June 21-26, 2020. The official results can be found on the ICPC web site.

"I am so proud of these outstanding young computer scientists," said computer science professor Stephen Strenn. "It was an honor and a privilege to see their hard work and team spirit come to fruition."

SBCC students' success in pitting themselves against students from world-class universities is a testament to the hard work, determination and intellect of its students. Special thanks go out to the Computer Science faculty (Nathalie Guebels, James Kinneavy, Allan Knight, Jackie Kuehn, Salmaun Masooman, Kira Minkova, Stephanie Newcomb, Stephen Strenn) and TA’s (Joseph Appleton and James Howard) for their guidance and support.