Feature

Programming Skill of Bangladeshi Students

M Kaykobad

PAST governments have identified that information technology has the potential of changing the fate of the country and its common mass and therefore, declared it as a thrust sector. Some initiatives have also been taken by the government with the hope of expediting the process.

This includes exempting IT equipment from taxes, facilitating capital for ICT business through Export Promotion Bureau and Bangladesh Bank, offering tax holidays to IT entrepreneurs, facilitating participation of entrepreneurs in Software exhibitions around the globe, establishing an incubator at the heart of the city for facilitating ICT business, giving free internet facility through Bangladesh Computer Council, establishing a shared uffice in the Silicon Valley with the dream of capturing a sizable amount of foreign currency through IT business and planning for a High-Tech Park. Public universities were advised to double their intake in IT related subjects although no budgetary allocation had been promised. We also planned for a billion dollar export business in line with what India has actually been doing but unfortunately till without much success. All private universities have opened computer science departments although there has been no plan from government to generate qualified graduates for teaching computer science and engineering. This was happening at a time when there has been boom in IT business, especially in North American belt. This resulted in a limited number of teachers helping to produce thousands of graduates to satisfy the demanded projected by our ICT industry people. Under the circumstances, keeping the quality up was really a very difficult problem. If we compare our education with that of India, Indian primary and secondary education level is much superior to ours. Indian universities have also earned much more respect than ours. While each IIT faculty member is a doctorate degree holder, the same is not true at BUET. Most of our faculty members are having a BSc Engineering degree with no exposure to education and technology available in developed countries.

Nevertheless, faculty members and students of ICT tried to reduce the deficit through creating a stimulating environment around IT education. We introduced International Conference on Computer and Information Technology(ICCIT) that is being organized every year by a different university for the last 11 years without a break. Performance of our undergraduate students in doing research is really very remarkable. By now, we have 25/30 BUET undergraduate students who have published their research findings in international journals of repute (please see details at www.csebuet.org for details)- a feat which any reputed university can boast of.

This has happened when we did not have adequate number of experienced faculty members, neither were we rich in laboratory facilities. In continuation of our research efforts for the last 2 years we have also started a quality Workshop on Algorithms and Computation organized jointly by Bangladesh Academy of Sciences and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Proceedings of WALCOM 2008 has been published by Springer-Verlag. This may even be the first occasion in which proceedings of our conference or workshop has been published by such a reputed publishing house. In that sense ICT education community has become a trend setter in Bangladesh.

It is not only research, we have taken up commendable initiatives to sharpen programming skill of our students through organizing programming contests. It may be mentioned here that a National Computer programming Contest was organized at the initiative of Zakaria Swapan, Proshika and The Daily Star at Hotel Sheraton on the 5th of August, 1998 with the then Prime Minister and several ministers attending the prize-giving ceremony.

However, it all started with the Asia Region Dhaka Site Contest at North South University in 1997. Bangladeshi students for the first time participated in Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest(ICPC). This is a two-tier contest. In the first phase students have to participate in Regional Contests. In the second phase winning teams are invited to participate in the World Finals hosted in different continents. Each team, consisting of 3 students, is given a computer to share for 5 hours. Typically 8 to 10 problems are set for solutions. In the very first regional contest held in Bangladesh the team of Suman Kumar Nath, Rezaul Alam Chowdhury and Tarique Mesbaul Islam of BUET became champions and qualified for the world finals of ACM ICPC. A team of students from North South University was also invited as hosts. Since then in every world finals with about 50 to 100 teams Bangladeshi universities have been represented. Typically there are representatives of about 30 countries in this prestigious contest. While our universities cannot find their room in the list of topmost universities unless the list is stretched to contain 3 to 4 thousand universities, our students of computer science, being one of the recently introduced fields with inadequately experienced faculty members, have been regularly ensuring our presence in this prestigious contest. Not only that in the famous internet-based contest of Valladolid Site (acm.uva.es/problemset) Bangladeshi students have put their country in the number one position among about 190 countries. Rezaul Alam Chowdhury and Shahriar Manzoor had been topping the list for quite some time. They have also been participating in CodeJam contests with great success. Our Istiaque Ahmed qualified for the finals held in New York in 2006. Only 100 top programmers were selected from across the globe. We have a representative in top 100 programmers. Is it not an enviable achievement of ours? Can we expect to have a representative in such small a list of other disciplines of science and technology? Bangladesh has also received a rank of about 25 in TopCoder contest. Our students have also become champion at IIT Kanpur Site Asia Region Contest twice in 1999 and 2000 leaving aside multiple teams from each IIT. Not only that while we have so many questions about our own judges, BUET graduate and South East University faculty member Shahriar Manzoor is one of only 25 judges in the World Finals that have worked during the last 32 years of the contest. By the by he is the only Asian representative in this elite club. So we have a lot of things to be proud about. Our students, in particular those of BUET, have been consistently representing our country in the prestigious World Finals of ACM ICPC for the last 11 years- a level of consistency uncommon to our society.

It may be mentioned here that in addition to teams from BUET, NSU participated in the World Finals twice, AIUB once, DU once and EWU is participating this year. For details of the success one can browse icpc.baylor.edu/icpc to appreciate the achievement. It may be mentioned here that in year 2000 our team was placed above teams from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Georgia Tech and other famous universities.

This year 32nd World Finals was organized at Banff by the University of Alberta, Canada. 100 teams participated in the World Finals of which 2 teams were from Bangladesh. And we are proud to have Shahriar Manzoor as a judge who has judged the correctness of programs of the most talented wizards of the world.

(Dr Kaykobad is Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BUET)