Phd students from the GRAFO group attend as trainers to the Southwest Europeans of Competitive Programming in Milan (Italy).

Mar 25, 2022 2 min read

During April 23rd and 24th the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos participated in the Southwestern Europe Regional Contest https://swerc.eu/2021/about/ of competitive programming, the coaches of the teams were Jesús Sánchez-Oro Calvo, Isaac Lozano Osorio, Raúl Martín Santamaría, Sergio Pérez and Alejandra Casado.

Competition

In the competition 3 teams from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Informática represented the University against a total of 97 teams from more than 40 different universities from all over the region (France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Israel). It should be noted that 2 of our teams were composed of 2nd year students and one of 4th year students.

Results

https://swerc.eu/2021/theme/scoreboard/public/

The positions they occupied were:

60th Summer Teamto Francisco Tórtola Vivo - Cristian Pérez - Sergio Salazar

76º pik2s Raul Fauste - Sara Garcia - Alicia Pina

80º LongLongLovers Diego Palacios Ortega - David Billhardt - Xuqiang Liu

For all the teams this experience motivates them to continue training for the next competition (and so they show it every day in the competitive programming team of the URJC), but without forgetting the educational aspect, the training they get in algorithmics and programming for their future career, along with the points they earn by having in their CV a competition at European level is the biggest prize.

Finally, congratulations to HARBOUR.SPACE for the great results, we will follow you in the world final, good luck.

Growing interest

There are already more than 200 people who form the competitive group of the URJC, many of them are already working in companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and even many decide to stay researching for the GRAFO group, each time they train more and we hope that together with the trainers they will get better results year after year.

Nicolás Rodríguez Uribe

Phd in Artificial Intelligence

Nicolás Rodríguez Uribe graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in 2015. Subsequently, he completed a Master’s Degree in Decision Systems Engineering in 2018 and obtained his Doctorate in Artificial Intelligence from the same university in 2022. His main research interests focus on heuristics and metaheuristics, combinatorial optimization, trajectory algorithms, genetic algorithms, and multi-objective problems. He is a member of the high-performance research group in optimization algorithms (GRAFO) at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. Most of his publications deal with the development of heuristic and metaheuristic procedures to solve complex optimization problems.