On May 27, 2015, Suzhou, a historic, scenic city in southeast China, hosted this year’s finals of the Beauty of Programming (BoP) competition, a creative contest among talented young programmers. Sponsored by Microsoft in collaboration with IEEE, BoP encourages contestants to use their programming skills to solve practical problems.
With a theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI), BoP 2015 attracted more than 22,000 online contestants from more than 150 universities. Code Hunt (opens in new tab), a game in which players demonstrate their coding skills by solving intriguing puzzles, served as one of two online challenges—hihoCodeer was the other—that narrowed the field to the top performers.
BoP 2015 attracted more than 22,000 online contestants from more than 150 universities.
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Fifty students made it to the final round in Suzhou, where they undertook either of two challenges designed by Microsoft employees. One, called Cortana Next, challenged contestants to create a voice assistant by using APIs from Project Oxford (opens in new tab). The other, named News Recommendation, asked the participants to sort out the most valuable news from 3,000 items.
Feihu Tang of Harbin Institute of Technology and Xiaoxu Guo from Shanghai Jiao Tong University earned first place. They chose the Cortana Next challenge and developed a travel app they named RainbowGO, which uses speech recognition, natural language processing and scenario analysis to turn Cortana into a proficient trip adviser. RainbowGO analyzes a traveler’s departure and destination sites to provide time conversions and information on round-trip tickets, nearby attractions and public transportation. Tang hopes to parlay his experience at BoP into someday starting his own business.
Feihu Tang demonstrates his app to Microsoft employees, including Yongdong Wang, CTO, Microsoft Asia R&D (blue shirt in the middle)
Xiaoqi Chen of Tsinghua University won second place for his News Recommendation app that uses the text segmentation API from the ltp-cloud.com and SVM algorithm to sort out the most valuable news. Chen and his partner, Junyan Li from Chinese University of Hong Kong, also took one of the two awards for Best Demo.
“I’m really excited by coding under a 12-hour deadline to solve a certain problem, and I enjoy the experience of pair programming,” said Chen, who was competing in his second BoP. He praised the contest as a chance to partner with an accomplished programmer.
Junyan Li (left) and his partner Xiaoqi Chen (right), who was competing in his
second BoP and got second place this time.
Chen adds that he was eager to compete against peers from India, which brings up an important aspect of this year’s BoP. The competition has always sought contestants with diverse backgrounds, but this year marked the first time that it included participants from India and Japan. Four enthusiastic contestants from Japan and India won the Best Team Award, and the Indian team also took home one of two Best Demo Awards.
“This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. The competition was very well organized and challenging. It’s such a good format and maybe it can go to the next level, like having more foreign teams in the future,” said Chirantan Mahipal, one of the winners from India.
“We hope to include more students from other countries in future BoP contests,” said Xin Ma, a senior research program manager at Microsoft Research Asia. “They are passionate about programming and add a lot to the brainstorming; after all, programming has no language barrier.”
Haoyong Zhang, a principal development manager at Microsoft’s Suzhou Center, noted that recent developments in the mobile Internet, big data and natural language processing contributed to the 2015 BoP theme of AI. “I hope contestants broadened their horizons through BoP, contemplating the revolutionary changes that ‘geek power’ and AI can make in the real world.”
Although the Beauty of Programming 2015 contest has ended, the contestants’ passion for computer programming remains. These talented young programmers are sure to have more opportunities to engage in innovative projects. We at Microsoft derive inspiration and motivation from the enthusiasm of these aspiring IT developers.
The 50 contestants who made it to the final BoP 2015 round in Suzhou
—Guobin Wu, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research
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