Friday Hacks #208: Evolution of Source Academy, and Organising ICFP Programming Contest 2019
Channel: NUS Hackers
Date: 10/09/2021

Chapters
0:00 Prof Henz's talk
1:07:25  Prof Sergey's talk

Talk #1: Source Academy: Past, Present, Future by Prof Martin Henz

The talk introduces the Source Academy, a medium-scale software project that builds an immersive online experiential environment for learning programming. Prof Henz explains the initial motivations that led to Source Academy Cadet in 2018. Significant improvements and extensions were made in versions Knight (2020) and Rook (2021). The talk describes the current system that is used by the CS1101S first-year batch in AY 2021/22 Sem 1, and share some thoughts and ideas of where the system could go in the future.

Speaker Profile
Prof Martin Henz is a professor at SoC with a focus on experiential and multidisciplinary learning. Prof Henz's research is in artificial intelligence, programming languages, and combinatorial search.

Talk #2: Running the ICFP 2019 Programming Contest by Prof Ilya Sergey

The ICFP Programming Contest is an international programming competition held annually around June or July since 1998, with results announced at the International Conference on Functional Programming. Teams may be of any size and any programming language(s) may be used. There is also no entry fee. Participants have 72 hours to complete and submit their entry over the Internet. The contest is typically dedicated to solving just one program, which can be attacked in multiple different ways.

In the talk Prof Sergey talks about his experience of organising the 2019 edition of the contest (https://icfpcontest2019.github.io/), which attracted 194 teams from 25 countries.

Speaker Profile
Ilya Sergey is an Associate Professor at Yale-NUS College and School of
Computing of National University of Singapore, where he leads the Verified
Systems Engineering lab. He is also a lead language designer at Zilliqa, a
Singapore FinTech start-up.

Ilya received his MSc in Mathematics from St Petersburg University in 2008 and his PhD in Computer Science from KU Leuven in 2012. He was a postdoctoral researcher at IMDEA Software Institute from 2013 to 2015 and a faculty at University College London from 2015 to 2018. He joined NUS in 2018, and was promoted to an Associate Professor with Tenure in 2021. Prior to starting his academic career, he worked as a software developer at JetBrains.

Ilya does research in programming language design and implementation, software verification, distributed systems, program synthesis and repair. He is the recipient of the 2019 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize and Google Faculty Research Award 2017. He designed and co-developed Scilla, a functional programming language for safe smart contracts, used by the Zilliqa blockchain.