Programmer's Day at UrFU

18:05, September 24, 2012

UrFU is getting ready for the ACM-ICPC World Finals

On 12 September Programmers’ Day is celebrated in Russia. It is an important holiday for the Ural Federal University which offers its prospective students over 46 programmes connected with IT and computer science. The main UrFU centres engaged in this kind of training and research are the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Institute of Radioelectronics and Information Technologies and the Institute of Physics and Technology. However, specialists in IT sphere are also trained at Graduate School of Economics and Management (major: “Applied Informatics”), Institute of Military Technical Education and Security (“IT Security”), Institute of Educational Information Technologies (“Computer and Information Sciences”), Institute of Fundamental Education (“Computer Fundamentals and IT”), Institute of Mechanical Engineering (“Industrial Automation of Technological Processes”).

It may seem that institutes of humanitarian and social studies stay away from training of future IT specialists. That’s not so! Firstly, a professional programmer graduating from a federal university is not only a high-ranked technical specialist, but also has vast knowledge in history, philosophy of science, and is fluent in at least one foreign language. Secondly, students and professors of all these UrFU institutes contribute a lot to the organization of important academic forums held at the University.

For instance, the Director of Institute of Humanities and Arts, Vice-Rector Dmitry Bugrov is sure that the University is ready to host the World Finals of the most influential international IT student contest – the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. The University’s bid was presented at the 2012 World Finals in Warsaw by UrFU Rector Viktor Koksharov and got the most favourable responses from the Executive Committee.

The Head of the Committee William Poucher visited Ekaterinburg in summer and got acquainted with the venues suggested for holding the contest. At the large-scale industrial exhibition “Innoprom” the Governor of Sverdlovsk region Evgeny Kuivashev, the Head of the City Administration Alexander Yakob and UrFU Rector Viktor Koksharov signed an agreement of cooperation in organizing the contest. “UrFU students have been participating in the world programming contests since 1998, and they have won a number of medals,” Dmitry Bugrov says. "Now we are doing our best to win the right to host the ACM-ICPC World Finals in 2016 or 2017. There are a lot of things to be done yet – the administration of the Team Sports Palace “Uralochka” and the concert hall “Cosmos” kindly sent us the floor plans for these buildings which were then translated into English and submitted to the Executive Committee”.

And in conclusion a few words about the holiday itself. On 11 September 2009 President Dmitry Medvedev signed Decree # 1034 prepared by the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications. According to this decree, Programmers’ Day became an officially recognized professional holiday in Russia. It is celebrated on the 256th day – 13 September, or in a leap year  - 12 September. The number 256 was chosen because it is the number of  possible values that can be represented with an eight-bit byte. 256 is also the highest power of 2 that is less than 365, the number of days in a common year.