The APOGEE English Press sat down with Rohan Srinivasan, the Computer Science Association (CSA) coordinator, to learn more about the functioning of the Association during the upcoming fest. The CSA serves as a ‘communication medium’ between the Department of CSIS and the students of the same branch, resolving any queries that the students may have. They also hold Alumni Research Talks, inviting BITS Alumni from all over the world who are currently researchers in the field.

Rohan said that the CSA would be organising four events this APOGEE. The first was Datageddon—a two day machine learning workshop—hosted by Abhirath Anand, the team lead at Sally Robotics. Held from March 25–26, he introduced everyone to the basics of machine learning. The workshop was followed by a continuous two day contest over the weekend, allowing participants to apply the knowledge they had learned in the workshop.

The next event is Anti-Coding, an entirely offline challenge held during the fest. Rohan described it as ‘coding with a twist’. Contesters will write simple C code, but they’ll have to optimise it according to certain parameters that will be revealed during the event itself.

The CSA will also be organising MindTurner, an online ‘capture-the-flag’ event held over a period of 48 hours where participants will have to clear all the questions posed in a round before advancing to the next one. 

CSA’s flagship event is the International Coding League (ICL), in collaboration with both Coding Club and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). While the first round was hosted online in March, the second round will be completely offline, held during APOGEE 2023. The ICL has a prize pool of over INR 40,000.

Rohan said that CSA was currently working on ensuring that their portal to organise some events was running smoothly, as well as on publicity for their events. Rohan told us that the team had run into a few hitches, but they were able to work with CoStAA to resolve them. 

Signing off, he reflected that the experience of being a coordinator and working with the team to organise events everyone had fun in was ‘rewarding’. He requested people to show up, participate, and most importantly, have as much fun as they can.