Mikhail Gustokashin

HSE students delivered an outstanding performance in the semi-final round of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), which took place in St Petersburg on December 15–17, 2025. Two teams—FFTilted from HSE University–Moscow and Muffix Sassif from HSE University–Nizhny Novgorod—will represent the university at the ICPC World Finals, scheduled for 2026. Other HSE teams also won gold and bronze medals. These results confirm the high level of training of HSE students in competitive programming.

The HSE University Faculty of Computer Science has hosted the third Techarena Challenge competition and the HSE Techarena Training Camp. More than 130 teams from Russian and international universities took part, competing to solve an optimisation problem. The on-site round, which was scored individually, lasted four hours.

On June 25, 2025, the final round of the University Battle took place, with 54 HSE students participating. The individual programming tournament for students, school pupils, and graduates was organised by Yandex as part of the Young Con festival dedicated to IT careers.

As part of the FonCode 2024 contest, the Russian Competitive Programming Federation (CPF) held its first award ceremony. Fedor Romashov, a student of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science, won the best competitive programmer award, and Mikhail Gustokashin, Director of the FCS Centre of Student Competitions, was named the best coach.

In early December, the finals of the Yandex Cup international programming competition took place in Tashkent (Uzbekistan). The prize, which totalled a record 16 million roubles, was shared among the winners from Russia, Belarus, Japan, the USA, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Dmitry Rempel, student of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science, won in the Backend track.

In August, 2024, the China ICBC Training Camp took place in Guiyang. The Youthful Passion Fruit team from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science participated in the programming contest. This event brought together around 40 teams from China, Japan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Mexico, and other countries.

On April 14–19, 2024, two finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) took place in Luxor (Egypt). The teams from HSE University’s Faculty of Computer Science became world champions in the 47th ICPC final and received gold medals in the 46th final.

HSE Online has launched the course ‘Algorithms and Data Structures–1’. Its author, and director of theCentre of Student Competitions at the Faculty of Computer Science, Mikhail Gustokashin, will teach students not only to how to solve problems offered at interviews at IT companies, but also to apply their knowledge in practice. The main skill acquired as a result of this course is the ability to write effective, working and tested code. The course is taught in Russian.

The final of the True Tech Champ Programming Olympiad from MTS took place at the end of October. Twelve students emerged as victors from the competition, including two second-year master’s students from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science, Ivan Safonov and Maxim Gorokhovsky.

Valery Rodionov, member of the Russian team who took gold at the 2023 International Olympiad in Informatics, has enrolled at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science. The intellectual competition took place in early September in Hungary.

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Challenge took place at the end of August. Unlike the traditional ICPC format, in which teams of three students solve a set of algorithmic tasks, participants of the ICPC Challenge must individually solve an optimisation problem that is relevant to science-driven industry, but which does not have an exact algorithmic solution. In the end, prize places were taken by Mikhail Gustokashin, Director of the Centre of Student Competitions at the HSE University Faculty of Computer Science (FCS), and Dmitry Rempel, student of the faculty.

From July 18 to October 15, 2023, the HSE University Faculty of Computer Science and AI Centre invite those interested to take part in the online Binary Super Resolution Challenge (BSRC-2023). The top 50 teams will receive prizes, and the top three will receive cash prizes.

On December 6–7, 2022, the semifinal of the  International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) took place in St Petersburg. Two teams from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science won medals at NERC 2022: FFTilted took overall 2nd place and received the gold medal, and It Has To Work took 8th place (silver medal). Two teams from HSE University—FFTilted (Moscow) and Just3Keks (St Petersburg)—will take part in the ICPC finals, which will be held in Egypt in 2023.

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals took place on November 6–11 in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. The team from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science (FCS) took ninth place, winning bronze and achieving the best result among Russian universities.

Two teams from the HSE University Faculty of Computer Science (FCS) in Moscow have taken first and second place in the semi-finals of the 2022 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). The last time a single university took both first and second place was in 1997. Almost 250 teams took part in the event, five of which were from HSE University in Moscow. A team from HSE University in St Petersburg took fourth place. The winning team was awarded the winner’s trophy of the ICPC semi-finals, while the HSE University teams that placed second and fourth won gold medals.

Fourth-year HSE students Ivan Safonov and Mikhail Anoprenko of the Faculty of Computer Science have won a bronze award in the International Collegiate Programming Contest. The competition finals were held in Moscow on October 5. Students from HSE University’s campuses in Moscow and St. Petersburg took part in the competition, with the team from Russia’s second city placing 19^th overall.

Students of the St. Petersburg School of Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science Vasily Alferov, Konstantin Makhnev and Maxim Surkov, have won the online round of the ICPC semi-final - student world programming championship. A team from the Faculty of Computer Science of HSE University in Moscow is also in the top three. In addition, three more teams from HSE Moscow and St. Petersburg made it through to the next round.

Third-year students of the Bachelor’s Programme in Applied Mathematics and Information Science Ivan Safonov, Ramazan Rakhmatullin, and Maxim Gorokhovsky won the Moscow Regional Contest—the first qualifying round of the international student world programming championship ICPC 2020/2021. In total, 45 HSE University took part, with 30 of them receiving certificates of various degrees.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Faculty of Computer Science does not relent and starts new projects as well as maintains the old ones. This spring, the Faculty and HSE International Centre for Research and Teaching started the advanced training courses “Methods and practice of Python programming teaching” and “Basics of machine learning for university professors”.

A team from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science was one of the top-ranking teams in the semi-finals of a collegiate programming tournament held in St. Petersburg this year. HSE’s team will now compete in the finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, which is set to take place in the United States next May.

The semi-finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) took place on December 7, and two teams from HSE received second place certificates. One of the teams was fastest at carrying out its task and made it to the finals, which will take place in Morocco in May 2015.