Abstract

Competitive programming is the act of solving highly challenging algorithmic problems from programming contests. The problems are fun and interesting, and convey the use of several different algorithmic techniques at once. They also serve as excellent pedagogical tools for teaching algorithms. I will provide a quick survey of programming contests, and give some resources that will get one started on this exciting journey. I will also discuss solutions to Animal Classification, a common problem in bio-informatics that involves finding common subsets between different evolutionary (or classification) trees.

About the Speaker

I am an assistant professor (teaching track) of computer science at Florida Institute of Technology. I received my Ph.D. from Clemson University under the supervision of Dr. Brian Dean in December 2016. I am fascinated by everything that involves algorithms. My research interests broadly include competitive programming, theoretical algorithms and data structures, graph theory, and computer science education. Lately, I am also venturing on projects that involve writing simple artificial intelligence agents to two player adversarial games.