An alumni day

The Alumni Talk and the Opening Ceremony were the main events of the ICPC World Finals 2025 today. Among other things, they demonstrated two of the best careers (according to my own perception, of course :)) that the ICPC crowd can choose: the Alumni Talk was about fundamental computer science research, in this case of the core graph shortest path algorithms, while the Opening Ceremony introduced two new sponsors, Google DeepMind and OpenAI, which represent just as cutting-edge but more practical ML/AI research. On a more meta note, it is fascinating how from talking with different ICPC participants and alumni, there are those that consider it an important career step to one of the above fields, there are also those who really want to win it or get a medal, but there are also those who are here to have fun and mingle with like-minded people, and the event works great for all of them. Well done to the organizers!

Another highlight of this year is a series of alumni events which are not on the main schedule, but for me personally look more interesting than many of the main events. If you're onsite in Baku, come chat with us, in particular I will be hosting on Wednesday at 17:30! I am also looking for a topic for my session, even though "Meet and Greet" also works. One topic that flows naturally from this blog is something like "blogging in the age of TikTok and Discord", but I'm not sure if it is the most interesting one :)

The ICPC Quest today asked us to go back to the old photos in the ICPC photo gallery. My photos in the ICPC photo gallery do start with my first participation in 2003 in Beverly Hills, and you can see the one I like the most from that year on the left.

Thanks for reading, and check back tomorrow for more #ICPCBaku updates!