Friday Hacks #208: Source Academy & ICFP 2019 Programming Contest
Posted on by Zhang Ziqing
Date/Time: Friday, September 10 at 7:00pm
Venue: AS6 LT15 & Online on Zoom (Hybrid)
RSVP: Sign up here only if you are NUS attendees and wish to come for F2F Session.
Zoom Link: https://nus-sg.zoom.us/j/83651946480?pwd=dG84TWFOQUltWjE4bUlWaWF1bEcvdz09
Source Academy: Past, Present, Future
Talk Description:
The talk will introduce the Source Academy, a medium-scale software project that builds an immersive online experiential environment for learning programming. Prof Martin will explain the initial motivations that led to Source Academy Cadet in 2018. Significant improvements and extensions were made in versions Knight (2020) and Rook (2021). The talk will describe the current system that is used by the CS1101S first-year batch this semester, and share some thoughts and ideas of where the system could go in the future. Prof Martin will welcome ideas from the audience and hope for a constructive discussion after the talk.
Speaker Profile:
Prof Martin Henz is a Computer science educator with focus on experiential and multidisciplinary learning; research in artificial intelligence, programming languages, and combinatorial search.
Running the ICFP 2019 Programming Contest
Talk Description:
The ICFP Programming Contest is an international programming competition held annually around June or July since 1998, with results announced at the International Conference on Functional Programming. Teams may be of any size and any programming language(s) may be used. There is also no entry fee. Participants have 72 hours to complete and submit their entry over the Internet. The contest is typically dedicated to solving just one program, which can be attacked in multiple different ways.
In the talk Ilya Sergey will talk about his experience of organising the 2019 edition of the contest (https://icfpcontest2019.github.io/), which attracted 194 teams from 25 countries.
Speaker Profile:
Ilya Sergey is an Associate Professor at Yale-NUS College and School of Computing of National University of Singapore, where he leads the Verified Systems Engineering lab. He is also a lead language designer at Zilliqa, a Singapore FinTech start-up.
Ilya received his MSc in Mathematics from St Petersburg University in 2008 and his PhD in Computer Science from KU Leuven in 2012. He was a postdoctoral researcher at IMDEA Software Institute from 2013 to 2015 and a faculty at University College London from 2015 to 2018. He joined NUS in 2018, and was promoted to an Associate Professor with Tenure in 2021. Prior to starting his academic career, he worked as a software developer at JetBrains.
Ilya does research in programming language design and implementation, software verification, distributed systems, program synthesis and repair. He is the recipient of the 2019 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize and Google Faculty Research Award 2017. He designed and co-developed Scilla, a functional programming language for safe smart contracts, used by Zilliqa blockchain.