Divakar Verma, APOGEE coordinator of the Association for Computing Machinery, was huddled with his fellow club members around a laptop. All the members were critically analyzing what seemed to be a beta-version of the Stock Market Simulation, when the press entered 2206. After exchanging formalities, we sat upon the side-rails of FD-2 and Divakar began describing his experience as coordinator.

“We’re hosting seven events this year, three more than the year before!” he beams. The most-awaited events this year include Stock Market Simulation, Checkmate, the International Coding League, and Deal With Distractions – the latter being a new event arranged by the freshly formed ACM Women’s Chapter. “Last year we had a few difficulties in registration which had hurt participation in Stock Market Simulation”, he laments. This APOGEE, not only have ACM streamlined the registration process this year, they have eliminated the archaic practice of using paper slips for trading and replaced it with online trading.

ICL (International Coding League) is a kernel event organized in collaboration with the CSA. It is an archetypal competitive coding event which will be ranked and hosted on CodeChef this year and Divakar expects it to draw over 4000 participants. “Checkmate is a very important event for us”, he says. Every year, all the IPC labs booked for the event are completely filled with BITSians eager to partake. Checkmate is an aptitude test with a set “game-plan” that participants must follow. To deal with the massive popularity of the event, ACM has increased the number of rooms booked by fifty percent, Divakar stated.

ACM’s flagship events this Apogee include the Machine Learning Hackathon in association with MapMyIndia (APOGEE’s title sponsor) and the Machine Learning symposium. An ecstatic Divakar claimed that this is the first time an ML hackathon will be organized on such a scale, especially for free. A series of workshops will be organized to familiarize would be participants with the fundamentals of ML and some of Python’s inbuilt libraries for data analysis. “The initial dataset given by MapMyIndia was under active analysis by them and would have driven down submissions due to its difficulty. After tempering their expectations however, we were able to get a more standard dataset for the problem statement”, explains Divakar. The symposium will feature three eminent personalities from the field of Machine Learning. The “Project Lead” of IBM will be making an appearance as well as ACM’s very own “Research Head”.

“I hope to see participation double this year”, says Divakar. “Doubling the number of events has certainly doubled my workload!”