Carnegie Mellon hosted the Morgan Stanley Coding Competition on October 24 and beat U Illinois, MIT and Columbia. This was the inaugural year of the competition.

The winning team included:

FRANKLIN HO, CS Senior
ZHENGHENG GHO, 5th Year Senior CS
YUCHENG LOW, Phd Program / Machine Learning
MINGWEI TAY, Masters Program / ECE

The prize (along with individual prizes for contestants), included a $10,000 prize to the CS Department.

The Competition:

In fall 2008, students from top technology schools were invited to test their programming and analytical skills against their classmates and other schools across the U.S. The Morgan Stanley Coding Contest challenged students to complete a complex, real-world-style programming task in a strictly limited time. Small teams of 2- 4 students competed to produce the optimal solution to an involved problem that was revealed on campus. During the contest, teams had the opportunity to speak with members of the Morgan Stanley technology division to find out how closely the contest mirrors the kind of challenges they will face every day when working for a top-tier, global financial services firm.

The Challenge:

Can you develop an algorithmic trading application, pit it against simulated market conditions, and come out a winner? You can write the application in your team's choice of programming language, using any open source libraries or tools. This is a hands-on task requiring sophisticated algorithm design and network programming.

The teams' completed applications will trade side-by-side on a simulated market in which both real-market data and game play affect prices. The application that produces the best trading performance-optimizing its portfolio throughout the simulation-will be the winner

In the championship round winners from each school will be pitted against teams from other leading U.S. technology schools: Columbia University; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Carnegie Mellon University; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Competitors will be invited to tour Morgan Stanley's global headquarters in New York City, where an additional twist to the problem will be revealed. Your team will have a limited time to adapt the program before being tested using real-market data.

All top teams from each school get $100 Best Buy gift cards (per team member). The team that wins the championship gets a Sony Mylo Internet Device (per team member) plus their school's Computer Science programs gets a $10,000 award from Morgan Stanley Technology.

SCHEDULE

University of Illinois: October 17- 18.
Carnegie Mellon University: October 24- 25.
MIT: November 7- 8.
Columbia: November 7- 8.

Morgan Stanley