I just realized I hadn't mentioned here something that had kept me busy over the autumn months. With my university, Télécom ParisTech, and with my colleagues Bertrand Meyer and Pierre Senellart, we have been organizing the SWERC programming contest in November 2017, and will do so again in December 2018. SWERC is the South-Western Europe Regional Contest for ACM ICPC which is the most famous competitive programming competition for university students. You can read more about the contest here. We have welcomed 76 teams of three contestants each, from 48 institutions in France, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. The top-3 teams in the rankings are from ENS Paris, ETH Zürich, and SNS Pisa: they will compete in the ICPC world finals in Beijing.

The Télécom student association Comète has made a very nice video covering SWERC'17, which went out recently, and gives a good idea of what the contest was like. You can watch it on Youtube or in the iframe below, or download it directly if you prefer.

If you like competitive programming, you can have a look at the SWERC'17 problems on our website, or on UVa Online Judge or ACM-ICPC Live Archive. And if you are from a university in South-Western Europe and are eligible to participate, then we'd be glad to see you compete at SWERC'18! Registrations will open here in early September 2018.