A team consisted of four students from Department of Electrical Engineering recently won the fifth place in an island-wide computer programming contest entitled “2009 Natural Born Programmer” launched by the Trend Micro Taiwan. The team also won the Most Trustworthy Award in the contest. Tamkang University is the only private university that advanced to the finals of the event. The team of four are Chiu Yu-hsien, Li Po-i, Lin Chih-hsin, Yen Po-hsun. Together they won a total prize money of NT$ 160000 and a certificate of award.

Team’s instructor Dr. Chuang Po-jen of the Department of Electrical Engineering said the main theme of the competition is the “Cloud Computing.” “Basically, Cloud Computing is a kind of Distributed Computing Technologies that can sort out all kinds of information from all sides within a short time, providing the service similar to a super computer,” said Chuang. Chuang admitted that he did not expect his students could claim such good ranking in the national contest especially when other competitors are all from national universities. He attributed to the good performance to his students’ hardworking and seriously studying on programming in school.

Lin Chih-hsin, a junior in the department and a first-timer in the event, said that there are very few contest that aiming at programmers. And therefore, many of his teammates were joining such contest for the first time. But they all make use of the knowledge they learn on textbooks and adding some creativity to do well in the competition, which help them to win high credit from the judges. Lin’s teammate Li Po-i, a fifth year PHD student, said he has learned a lot during the highly competitive contest, while adding that he wished to join such contest again next year. ( ~Yeh Yun-kai )