ITMO Students Secure Prizes at International Championship IT Planet Professionals

Both Artem Sukhov and Alexandra Sukhotina chose the track of the championship that focused on Platform V Pangolin, a pioneering Russian database management system, specifically suited for data storage and characterized by high security, accessibility, reliability, and efficiency. 

In total, the competition included three stages: online testing of SQL fundamentals and two practical tasks based on a real database of railway traffic. In the second stage, students had to identify the longest route taking into account all factors (time, transfers, and train schedules), while the third stage tasked the participants with locating equidistant stations that form the biggest possible triangle given only their coordinates. 13 participants proceeded to the onsite final stage that took place in Moscow.

Russian students and qualified higher education graduates from all over the world took part in the championship.

Artem Sukhov, a Master’s student in mathematical and computer modeling, took the second place in the championship, bagging a 300,000-ruble prize.

“My success is due to my programming experience: I wrote down every operation in my algorithm, identified weaknesses, and optimized them. After that, my code would take around 17 minutes to compute, which made it possible to test out several calculation methods before finally arriving at the solution. At such competitions, you truly expand your horizons as an IT specialist – there’s a new environment, a different city, and a chance to get to know motivated students and experts in the field,” shares Artem Sukhov. 

The third place was taken by Alexandra Sukhotina, a Master’s student in data analytics, who secured a 100,000-ruble prize.

“For me, the main catch in the third stage was not in finding a solution, but in optimizing it. This is a rather common case for IT Planet – you need to improve your solution to land in the top three, which means you have to have quite a diverse experience in your professional field. However, it’s all definitely worth it: with an IT Planet finalist diploma, you basically get to skip one of the job interview stages, as it demonstrates that you can solve both regular and uncommon tasks in your field,” shares Alexandra Sukhotina. 

The championship was organized by the Center for Innovative Technologies Development IT Planet, with SberTech, a Russian software developer, as the event’s general partner and GitVerse, a Russian source code management platform, as the technological partner.