On Thursday, November 1st, Two Sigma, a proud sponsor of the North American ICPC regionals, hosted participants from their recent online practice competition at their New York City offices. The top 20 online challenge scorers were invited to hear senior leaders speak, learn from an engineering technical talk, listen to a panel of past ICPC participants, and receive a Two Sigma office tour!
Two Sigma is a different kind of investment manager. Founded in 2001 by a data scientist and a mathematician, they use data science and technology to uncover value in markets worldwide. Their team of scientists, technologists, and academics looks beyond traditional finance to develop creative solutions to some of the world’s most challenging economic problems.
Tom Widland, a lead researcher in Two Sigma’s modeling division, welcomed the ICPC guests. Tom has been working at Two Sigma for 12 years, but before that he was an ICPC competitor at the World Finals in Prague and Los Angeles. Tom spoke about his college days as an ICPC competitor, and shared that it was one of his ICPC teammates who introduced him to Two Sigma and the field of quantitative finance! Claudia Perlich, a senior Data Scientist , gave a technical talk called “Human Intuition in Machine Learning,” in which she spoke about the role of humans in the fast-growing field of Machine Learning.
Guests were also treated to a panel with three past ICPC participants who are now Two Sigma employees, including
- JongMan, a quantitative software engineer who attended the ICPC World Finals in Prague and Los Angeles,
- Anna, a front-end platform engineer who competed in Olimpiada Informatyczna, Potyczki Algorytmiczne and Poznan Open Team Programming Competition in high school, and
- Jose, a data engineer who attended the ICPC World Finals in Morocco and Thailand.
Panel with past ICPC competitors who work at Two Sigma
The panelists fondly recalled their ICPC days, remembering the late nights spent cleaning up code and the fun times spent meeting fellow competitors in board game rooms. They also spoke about how their competitive coding days led them to Two Sigma, and how they still use the skills they learned. JongMan said, “it’s surprisingly relevant. Many of the things I learned in programming competitions carried over.” Jose added, “the competition trains you for more than just the competition itself. It gives you skills that help you along your career, like working well under pressure and being able to prioritize.”
Next, the group was given a tour of the Two Sigma office, from fully-stocked kitchens, to a music room and an AI-powered air hockey table. The highlight was the Hacker Lab: a fun innovation space that includes 3D printers, Raspberry Pi projects, and Baxter – Two Sigma’s unofficial robot mascot .
To cap off the day, participants received an introduction to Two Sigma’s Halite AI programming challenge. Halite, currently in its third iteration, is a fun and collaborative open source challenge that was designed by Two Sigma interns. Feeling inspired? The challenge is open until January 22nd, and participants can build a bot in any programming language! Click here to join in on the fun.
Two Sigma employees speaking about Halite, an AI programming challenge