Santa Barbara City College’s programming teams won first runner-up honors among two-year schools in the 2019 Southern California Regionals for the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) Nov. 9 in Riverside.

The top SBCC team, consisting of Monica Aguilar, Nhan Le and Jianlyu Mao, outscored teams from a number of four-year universities, including Cal Tech, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside and UC San Diego. This year, 88 teams from 24 institutions in the Southern California region competed.

Other SBCC teams also competed successfully. Team members included Ben Akely, Abdul Alkhattari, Selah Argent, Rafael Carrillo, John Ericson, Jack Ferrone, Elliot Gerlach, Nhan Le, Reid Madock, Jianlyu Mao, Estela Ramirez, Piero Trujillo, Tys vanZeyl, Wade Varesio, Josh Villanueva, Lihong Wu and Zack Zerman.

The ICPC challenges three-person student teams to solve a set of 10 programming problems in five hours. The competiton’s first place team, from Cal Tech, solved nine problems in five hours. The Cal Tech team will compete in the ICPC World Finals to be held in Moscow in June. The official results can be found on the ICPC web site.

“I am so proud of these outstanding young computer scientists,” said Stephen Strenn, computer science professor and coach. “It was an honor and a privilege to see their hard work and team spirit come to fruition.”

Special thanks to the computer science faculty — Nathalie Guebels, James Kinneavy, Allan Knight, Jackie Kuehn, Salmaun Masooman, Kira Minkova, Stephanie Newcomb and Stephen Strenn; and teaching assisstants Joseph Appleton and James Howard — for their guidance and support.

— Stephen Strenn for SBCC.