The semi-final of the World Cup in programming took place in St. Petersburg on December 07, 2014. A team of the Institute of Calculus Mathematics and Information Technologies took part in this competition.

The World Cup in programming among higher educational institutions’ teams has been held since 1977. Its organizer, the International association ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), along with IEEE Computer Society and British Computer Society, is among the top three most authoritative associations of IT professionals in the world.

The event scheme includes three stages: quarterfinals (zonal), semi-finals (regional) and the final. Teams winning victories in regional groups (semi-finals) reach the final and fight for titles of world champions and champions of different regions – Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America, Pacific region, Africa and Middle East.

To reach the final, students of Kazan University had to sustain a strong competition: they had to join the top 200 according to results of a quarterfinal (with 8000 teams participating in it), and then spurt into the lead, becoming one of 15 lucky teams.

Students of KFU have been taking part in the championship since 2002. More than once they managed to be qualified for semi-finals. However, it was the first time that representatives of our University achieved such success as in this year.

In many respects it was promoted by intense training of the students from our team by highly skilled staff of the Institute of Calculus Mathematics and Information Technologies with involvement of world champions in programming. In particular, the VII open ICMIT team championship in Olympiad programming was organized in the framework of this training with the assistance of the leading IT companies: Google (European research center), Groupon (USA), Fix, Provectus, MX-Engineering, Bars Group. Teams from Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Zurich (Switzerland) took part in this event.