BIOINFORMATICS CONTEST
FEBRUARY 2019
The third Bioinformatics Contest — an online programming competition among individuals — took place in February 2019.

More than 3300 participants from 105 countries with background in Computer Science, Molecular Biology, and Machine Learning participated in the Contest.

Winners 2019
1st place (GOLD)
Gennady Korotkevich – 6310.13 points

2nd place (SILVER)
Nikolay Budin – 5211.06 points

3rd place (BRONZE)
Zakhar Iakovlev – 4921.51points

4th place
Michael Kirsche – 4744.26 points

5th place
Yuchen Zhou – 4576.74 points

6th-21st places
Sergey Zolotarev
Semenov Yury
Dinara Usmanova
Virgile Andreani
Kira Kondratyeva
Rayan Chikhi
Gretchen M Wright
Kirill Tsukanov
Tatsuhiko Naito
Natalyya Ginzburg
Frederik Andersen
Michal Punčochář
Vladimir Kovačević
Pavel Chuprikov
Mihail Krivonosov
Dohoon Lee

Final Standings 2019
Results
In February 2019 Bioinformatics Institute in cooperation with ITMO University, Rosalind and Stepik organized the third online programming competition — Bioinformatics Contest 2019.

Every year it attracts more than three thousand bioinformaticians, computer scientists, and biologists from all over the world. The Contest is focused on solving bioinformatics problems using programming and data analysis.

The ultimate goal is to solve as many problems as possible within 24 hours to become the best competitive bioinformatician in the world. Everything is set up online. Submissions are auto-graded in real time.

This year 3329 people from 105 countries participated. 489 of them moved onto the Final Round for a chance to win whole exome sequencing or genetic engineering home lab kit or Oxford Nanopore MinION (by winners choice!).

Here are the winners of the Bioinformatics Contest 2019:

  • 1st place (GOLD): Gennady Korotkevich, 6310.13 points
  • 2nd place (SILVER): Nikolay Budin, 5211.06 points
  • 3rd place (BRONZE): Zakhar Iakovlev, 4921.51 points
  • 4th place: Michael Kirsche, 4744.26 points
  • 5th place: Yuchen Zhou, 4576.74 points

6th-21st places: Sergey Zolotarev, Yury Semenov, Dinara Usmanova, Virgile Andreani, Kira Kondratyeva, Rayan Chikhi, Gretchen M Wright, Kirill Tsukanov, Tatsuhiko Naito, Natalyya Ginzburg, Frederik Andersen, Michal Punčochář, Vladimir Kovačević, Pavel Chuprikov, Mihail Krivonosov, Dohoon Lee.

The finals standings are available on http://mon.stepik.org/2019-finals.html.

The Contest was organized in two rounds – the Qualification Round and the finals. Participants were required to solve a certain number of qualification problems to advance to the Final Round.

The Qualification Round 2019 lasted for a week (February 2–10) and consisted of three problems with 12 sub-problems. The Final Round lasted for 24 hours starting on February 23 and included five challenging problems with 27 sub-problems.

The problems were dedicated to cancer and chromosome rearrangements, epigenomic marks, transposable elements, bacterial communities, sequencing errors, and several others. All the problems remain available by the following link: https://stepik.org/43615. You can also listen to the podcast starring Gennady Korotkevich, the 1st place winner, and Alexey Sergushichev, one of the organizers.

The problem sets were developed by the team from ITMO University – the only 7-time winner of the world's top programming competition and well-known for the top-ranked competitive programmers.

In 2019 the team of developers included: Vitalii Aksenov, Alexey Sergushichev, Artem Vasiliev, Vitalii Demyanyuk, Nikita Alexeev, Ilya Zban, Grigory Shovkoplyas, Maria Atamanova, Dmitry Yakutov from ITMO University, and Sergey Aganezov from Johns Hopkins University. The organizers also want to thank German Demidov, Rayan Chikhi, and Mike Rayko for contributing to the problem ideas.

Participants identified themselves as computer scientists (29%), biologists (29%), bioinformaticians (16%), mathematicians (8%), and others. Most of the participants were interested in solving biological problems by figuring out efficient algorithms and by modeling biological processes.
Bioinformatics Contest 2019 was supported by our generous sponsors — JetBrains, Serokell, and Yandex, and we would like to sincerely thank them!

JetBrains is the world's leading vendor of professional development tools.

Serokell is an international software research and development company, specializing in the development of data-intensive projects, such as the implementation of IoT, Fintech, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence.

Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning.


We do hope that computer scientists and biologists who participated in the event got inspired to pursue a career in bioinformatics and to become specialists so needed by the modern life sciences!

Participants Feedback
More reviews are published on Stepik.
Contest Team

Bioinformatics Contest problem sets are developed by the team including experts from ITMO University — the only 7-time winner of the world top programming competition and well-known for the top-ranked competitive programmers.

Developers
Sergey Aganezov
Johns Hopkins University
Nikita Alexeev
ITMO University
Maria Atamanova
ITMO University
Vitalii Demyanyuk
ITMO University
Grigory Shovkoplyas
ITMO University
Artem Vasiliev
ITMO University
Dmitry Yakutov
ITMO University
Ilya Zban
ITMO University
Vitalii Aksenov
ITMO University
Developers Coordinator
Alexey Sergushichev
ITMO University
Developers Coordinator
Coordinators
Ekaterina Vyahhi
Bioinformatics Institute
Coordinators Lead
Olga Bondareva
Bioinformatics Institute
Nikolay Vyahhi
Stepik & Rosalind
Aleksandra Panteleeva
Bioinformatics Institute
Partners & Sponsors
If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, please feel free to reach us at contest@bioinf.me_
Organizers
Bioinformatics Institute is a non-governmental non-profit research and educational institution. Our mission is to educate the new generation of highly skilled professionals and popularize bioinformatics in Russia. The Institute's programs, events, and online courses are open to students and professionals with mathematics, computer science or biology background. Our main research area is NGS bioinformatics and its application towards systems biology and medicine.
ITMO University is the leading Russian university in the field of Computer Science. It is the alma mater of winners of numerous international programming competitions such as ACM ICPC, Google Code Jam, and Facebook Hacker Cup. Several bioinformatics research groups gradually formed around these CS-champions, and ITMO University aims to further develop the area with initatives like Bioinformatics Contest and Master program in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology.
Stepik is a cloud-based platform that is designed to create and distribute interactive educational content as well as provide various types of automatically graded assignments with real-time feedback. The platform is suitable for a multitude of e-learning activities, from private on-campus classes to massive open online courses (MOOCs).
Rosalind is a platform for learning bioinformatics and programming through problem solving. It offers an array of intellectually stimulating problems that grow in biological and computational complexity; each problem is checked automatically so that the only resource required to learn bioinformatics is an internet connection.
Stay tuned!