Procom 2008
I was invited by the faculty and student body at FAST NU to judge the Procom.Net 2008 Software Competition. Most of you may not know – FAST NU is one of the best engineering schools we have here in Pakistan. Think Stanford of Pakistan. I’ll let GIKI be MIT and LUMS be Harvard.
Anyways Procom has become an annual tradition at FAST NU where student engineers from all over the country come down to Karachi for a few days and compete in various competitions in programming, software, network design, hardware, circuit design and hacking. The event is conducted in association with a student branch of IEEE.
Some of the smartest people at Creative Chaos participated at Procom in their college days and most of them won or were runner ups. Therefore I’ve always held the institution and the competition in very high regard. When I was asked if I would be interested in coming to the event and judging the software competition – I immediately accepted the offer. It was like winning free backstage passes to a software lollapalooza.
I requested a colleague of mine Monis Iqbal – a brilliant engineer, a FAST alumni and a Procom winner to accompany me to the event. We reached the campus around noon. I was immediately given a brief orientation, a Procom judge tag and a scoring sheet which had a list of 10 projects that I was asked to judge.
Each project was to be rated between 1 and 10 on Scope, Knowledge, Code, Presentation, Completeness and a couple other attributes that I don’t remember. The projects ranged from image processing, facial animation, speech construction, 3d game, text-mining to intelligent bots.
In order to be fair and consistent I developed a simple strategy as I would work my way through the different projects. I would first see the presentation, look at the documentation, review the code and then challenge the project owners with some questions.
I went over to the first project and asked the team to present me their work. Two contestants took center-stage and started blabbering about their project. I’m using the word blabber because there was no prepared presentation. I saw a power point on their screen – which was never referenced. The contestants just went on and on in circles. I was not impressed. Their demo was badly organized with frequent visits to visual studio to compile and recompile everything with different settings. They kept mentioning a lot of different papers that they had used in their project but when I asked them to show me their documentation, I was shocked to find that they did not properly cite and did not maintain a bibliography section. I had a look at their code and it did not have any comments. I was disappointed. I asked them why they did not comment their code and they replied that they plan to – they just did not have enough time.
I graded this project average. I thought maybe it was a bad start and moved to the next one only to find that this group did not believe in any project documentation, did not have a prepared presentation and that the project was a derivative of a previous years students’ senior thesis. You’ve got to be joking? This is an All Pakistan Software Competition and you have the nerve to come in with no presentation, no documentation and not even your own work. Where are the organizers? I asked Monis and he was as amazed as I was. I moved on hoping the story would change – but it did not. Everything went downhill from here on. There was a project in which the team simply compiled a popular AI engine and just demonstrated it! I asked them to show me their documentation and they showed it with all the headers from the company that developed it. I asked this team what was the point of this charade and they told me that their professors had asked them to participate in the event a couple of weeks ago and this is the best they could do.
I was furious. I felt cheated and wanted to go to the organizers and ask them their eligibility criteria. Monis who has been a participant himself in 2004 was as perplexed. According to him the success of the event is based on the participants and this year no one felt like they were interested. The software competition this year was a complete sham!
The highlight of the competition was a 3d game developed by students from Bahria University. The developers used the 3d torque game engine to create a complete level for a FPS style game. While this wasn’t anything extra ordinary – I was impressed that the engineers kept the scope of their project real and completed it. The game looked good, there were no issues with their demo and the lead developer was genuinely passionate about graphics and game design and development.
My average rating for all the projects I judged was 3 out of 10 which should give you all an idea of how mediocre the entire event really was. The event has lost credibility in my eyes and I hope that the faculty and organizers will work on fixing this problem. All I’m asking for is passion, intent, presentation, documentation and a good demonstration.
