Hello Codeforces!

I am pleased to announce a long term partnership with Harbour.Space University and Codeforces.

Harbour.Space is supporting the return of a new series of educational rounds on Codeforces!

They will take place with the regularity of ~2 times per month with the first round on 14:35 UTC, 27th of March, 2017.

Education Rounds Rules:

• Scholarships to study Data Science, Computer Science and Cybersecurity in Barcelona for best performing participants, courtesy of Harbour.Space University (more details later!);
• Classic Duration: 1.5 — 2.5 hours;
• The goal is rather to practice and to educate, than to compete;
• Not only problems, but also exercises can be used;
• Useful, even well-known ideas can be reused in order to introduce them to a wide range of participants;
• Unrated (perhaps only for now);
• We will conduct them in the ACM-ICPC mode;
• The results that are obtained after the end of the round, are preliminary;
• After the end of the round will be a 24-hour period of open hacks — any visitor of Codeforces may try to hack any complete solution to a problem of the last round (either from a contest, or from practice), the source code of hacking solution is available (you can copy the text and, for example, stress it);
• All successful hacks from the previous item will be added to the official test set and after as long as 24 hours after the end of the round retesting of all complete solutions will be made;
• Only after the final standings based on improved test data, the results are final;
• Our ability to process such problems are limited, so actually the test suites from the jury are expected to end up incomplete — we are looking forward to your hacks!

In February I had a new and wonderful experience of coaching top teams at the Barcelona ACM-ICPC Bootcamp hosted by Harbour.Space University. I was really impressed by the university, participating teams and fellow coaches from our community such as Endagorion, GlebsHP, Michael, Jacob and snarknews that were also there.

During the bootcamp it became clear to me that Harbour.Space University is a new type of university that’s reinventing the university experience. It is a modern, adaptable and flexible university that is doing amazing things in preparing talented students for careers in Computer Science, Data Science and Cyber Security.

All of their programs are developed in collaboration with the industry and are taught by the top professionals in the respective fields such as Viktor Kantor, Edith Elkind, Alexander Kulikov, Alex Dainiak, Sergey Nikolenko, Deepa Gupta and many others. I am delighted to be joining Harbour.Space fantastic faculty. Together we are developing a series of courses on competitive programming in addition to the bi-annual ACM ICPC Bootcamp that will be hosted by the university in Barcelona.