ACS Students Storm Information Technology Olympiad

It would appear that students at ACS are either very well prepared, or spend their time over breaks and holidays exercising to stay sharp, work on their skills and train for competitions. Or both. We had barely flipped our calendars over to 2021 when the municipal round of the 19th National IT Olympiad took place online and ACSers from the Informatics Profile stormed it. In this project-based tournament, students were offered a 15-minute window to present and defend their original IT project.

Prompted by news reports on COVID-19 hospital bed shortage, senior Ivan Spirov designed a system for hospital bed allocation, which provides current, reliable and visually friendly information on available hospital beds and their locations. In turn, the youngest participant and ACS prep Kaloyan Dimitrov developed the ParoleMemo project which helps students write down and learn scientific terms, words and expressions in English. An added perk is that the web-based interface works seamlessly on all sorts of devices.

The force seems to be strong with ACS juniors for this Olympiad as Ognian Trajanov and Christian Varbanovski presented their Bulgarian language voice-synthesis software. While the idea is not necessarily ground-breaking, and the technology makes use of voice data recording and artificial intelligence processing to produce speech models, Ognyan and Kristian are pioneers in this area, as no such thing has been developed for the Bulgarian language yet. Their peer Yoana Stankova designed a web application “Smart History” which tells the users the decade of last century when their photo was taken and colorizes it with appropriate shades. You know, bringing memories back to life sort of thing. Maxim Selveliev presented a web-store for safely obtaining study aids in pandemic times, named Congo.

Congratulations to all students and their teachers. We are wishing you the best of luck in the next round of the Olympiad!