HCM City (VNA) - The 26thVietnamese Information Technology (IT) Olympiad and the ACM InternationalCollegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) for the Asian region opened in HCM Cityon December 6.

The opening ceremony was organised by the HCM City Universityof Education (HCMUE) in collaboration with the Vietnam Association forInformation Processing (VAIP) and the Vietnam Student’s Association.

After the regional contest, the top 36 teams will take partin the international competition at Beijing University in May next year.

More than 380 Vietnamese students from 64 universities andcolleges are attending the Olympiad.

The 2017 ACM/ICPC Asia HCM regional contest includes 444students in 148 teams, including 125 Vietnamese teams and 23 internationalteams from 14 universities from Japan, China, Thailand, the Republic of Korea,Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and Taiwan (China).

The ICPC is a multitier, team-based competition foroutstanding students in computing that promotes creativity, teamwork andinnovation in building new software programs, and enables students to testtheir ability to perform under pressure.

Its participation has grown to tens of thousands of thefinest students and faculty in computing disciplines at about 3,000universities from over 100 countries on six continents.

Speaking at the ceremony, Vice principal of HCMUE Dr. NguyenThi Minh Hong, said the ICPC contest had played an important role in providingIT staff for 25 years.

“The ICPC is the biggest mathematics contest and a playgroundfor computing students. It gives them a chance to improve their skills andoffers them an opportunity to show themselves to the worldwide IT community,”she said

Speaking at the event was Dr. Tran Viet Hung, founder of GotIt Inc., which created a mobile app designed to organise the world’s brainpowerand called Knowledge-as-a-Service. The app offers on-demand help for users inbite-size knowledge-time units.

“Software engineers play an important role in any IT team orcompany,” said Hung, who has experience working in Silicon Valley in the US.

He said that he hopes Vietnamese students become globalengineers in the future, and to achieve that aim, he urged them to improvetheir foreign language skills and to continually update their knowledge.

HCM City is one of the 18 sites for the ACM/ICPC – Asiaregional contest this year.

At the ceremony, organisers presented awards to winners ofthe online ACM/ICPC contest held in the south, central and northern areas inOctober, and the national ACM/ICPC contest last month, which attracted morethan 2,000 students.-VNA