This spring, teams from UGA’s School of Computing competed in the South East Region of the annual algorithmic programming contest held by International Competitive Programming Contest (ICPC). ICPC is the oldest and largest programming contest in the world.  The competition was held at UNG Dahlonega, one of the sites for the Southeast region of the competition. The competition lasted five hours and each team was made up of a maximum of three members trying to solve sets of coding problems with varying difficulties. 

This spring, UGA’s School of Computing’s The Hack Pack team placed second in the Southeast at the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity (NCAE-C) Cyber Game and is advancing to the national invitational this  April.

Throughout six hours of competition, as part of the blue team, the Hack Pack defended critical infrastructure in a high-stakes, intense competition against the opposing red team. The red team launched many attacks across multiple platforms, including: FTP, DNS, ICMP, Web, and Postgres. 

Morgan McGrath, right, meets with Christina Koch, center, a NASA astronaut, during her internship with NASA’s Electrical Test Team.

Prior to her December 2024 graduation, honors computer science student Morgan McGrath interned with NASA on the Electrical Test Team at the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida.