Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri campus, witnessed Asia’s first Hello India x Russia Programming Bootcamp, in collaboration with Harbour.Space University, Barcelona, Spain and Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology, from March 22-30, 2018. The camp was attended by 105 participants from 27 universities and several industries, including 35 who were from Japan, Singapore, Azerbaijan, Oman, Lithuania, Russia, as well as top engineering institutes in India such as: IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, BITS Pilani and IIIT Hyderabad.

The camp was inaugurated on March 22^nd by lighting the lamp. Prof. Anand Shenoi spearheaded the ACM ICPC bootcamp at Amritapuri campus. During the inauguration, the participants were addressed by Gleb Evstropov, ACM ICPC 2014, 2015 Gold Medalist; Veronica Soboleva, Harbour.Space University, Barcelona, Spain; Nikita Lukyanov, Moscow Workshops ACMICPC, MIPT. Harshit Mehta, Co-founder, TopCoder admin, also spoke to the attendees. The inaugural function was rendered more vibrant with an art performance by a talented little wonder, Sreelekshmi, that set the tone for the day. 

Eight whole days were devoted to preparing competitors for Brain Olympics domination and a vast world of networking with companies in the tech industry. During the boot camp, teams from around the world prepared strategies for the competition and practiced on similar coding exercises, as if in the world finals.

The boot camp was also held through the private initiatives of SDV (Social Discovery Ventures), Phaze Ventures, and the Al Jisr Foundation. These organizations facilitate cross collaboration with industrial and educational partners like MIPT, ITMO, Saint-Petersburg State University, Moscow Workshops ACM-ICPC, as well as the biggest online coding communities: Codeforces and Topcoder.

Moscow Workshops ACM ICPC began in 2012, and initially, it was attended only by teams from Russia and Belarus. Today, they organize five workshops a year in Russia, Belarus, Spain, and India. Representatives of 50 countries from all continents, except Antarctica, participate. An intensive training for the World Finals ACM ICPC is combined with information about national cultures, which provides the participants with healthy competition and a friendly atmosphere at the World Finals.

The ACM-ICPC itself has turned out some renowned captains of industry, including Adam D’Angelo, the former CTO of Facebook and founder of Quora; Nikolai Durov, former CTO of VK and current CTO of Telegram; Matei Zaharia, creator of Apache Spark; Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and a venture capitalist, Craig Silverstein, the first employee of Google.