Today was Rapid City Day, and teams and coaches had a chance to visit a local site of interest for half the day. In the other, they heard 3 talks exploring different emerging aspects of technology.
“Coding has an intimate relationship with the manufacturing process. You can’t take the two apart,” Dr. Rob Mudge from RPM Innovations told attendees. Mudge started the company, which now uses laser depostion to 3-D print metal objects as big as 7 feet tall including parts for things like airplanes.
After Mudge showed a video of the manufacturing process, he talked about the role of code in the “extreme quality control” that is needed to engineer and manufacture these kinds of path-critical products.
Mudge said his company also uses expert coders to secure company IT systems, noting “Manufacturing is the second-most attacked industry after healthcare,” he said.
Former World Finalist Vlad Novakovski took the stage next to talk about his career path since the ICPC and his lessons learned.
He encouraged participants to keep their interests broad early in their careers. “It’s all just zeroes and ones,” he said. Understanding the broad application of tech skills across different types of industries is the key to understanding your own value, he told participants.
He said “Being around lots of smart people early in life is an incredible asset,” which is a testament to chance this year’s finalists have to meet lots of very smart people from literally all over the world.
Erik Meijer closed things out with an energetic talk that kept participants chuckling as he explained how “steam-era” education in math and science is a disservice to innovation. “A lot of the programming languages stuff is really old,” he said, “It’s basically FORTRAN with different syntax.”
Meijer spoke in favor of probabilistic computing, noting that it is more honest than saying “Oh, yes, I really know what my function does. It has no bugs.” Meijer said in two or three years, “half of the code people write will be machine learned.”
He encouraged participants to push their instructors. “Don’t be afraid to ask ‘why is this useful? How can I write this in real functions’.”
The Tech Seminar was sponsored by Excellence in Computer Programming, a consortium between South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, the City of Rapid City and the state of South Dakota.