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17TECHNOLOGYTHEPHUKETNEWS.COM FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2016
@thephuketnews
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VSCO’s Instagram page hosts a variety of photos edited using the application.
St Petersburg State University has triumphed in the ACM Interna-tional Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC), beating 127 teams to win the “program-ming world championship” for Russia for a fifth straight year.
In the competition’s final stage, which took place in Phuket on May 19, three students from St Pe-tersburg beat their peers from China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Harvard and fellow Russian students from the Moscow Institute of Physics & Technol-ogy (MIPT). The St Petersburg team-mates led by Stanislav Ershov, Igor Pyshkin and Alexey Gordeev managed to solve 11 problems out of 12 during the five-hour grand final.
This year’s finals were hosted by the Prince of Songkla University (PSU) in Phuket, Thailand, which saw more
than 1,400 aspiring programmers from 40 countries participate at the rigorous trials to become world champions at the Saphan Hin Sports Complex.
ACM-ICPC is an annual multi-tiered competitive programming competition among the universities of the world, sponsored by IBM.
IBM’s ACM-ICPC Sponsorship Exec-utive and Director Gerald Lane praised the winners and participants of the chal-lenge, saying, “IBM values this opportu-nity to assemble the brightest students from the world’s leading universities and share with them the technology trends that will shape the future such as tools that allow them to build new innovations fueled by cloud, cognitive, unstructured data and more.”
He added, “These students will be the engine running future industry and IBM is proud of them and will support them so that they can provide new ideas and innovation of technology to all for the future.
ICPC Executive Director Dr Bill Po-cher added, “The ability to work as team and opportunity to compete in the con-test… ACM-ICPC will be with students for life. I was very excited to witness the talented young students at this event who were capable of solving challenging questions. The experience they had will help them in the future whether they decide to further their education or start working.”
Team Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
Harvard University, MIPT won medals for second, third and fourth places, re-spectively.
“The final contestants from 128 teams participated in the ICPC com-petition (country and regional levels) since the beginning of the year to be in Phuket for the final. They have been selected out of 300,000 computer stu-dents worldwide and more than 40,266 students made it to the regional level. They all had one common goal: to be in Phuket for the world finals.”
“At the event, students were exposed to the latest technology from IBM from experts who demonstrated and trained
them in Hybrid Cloud IBM platform, IBM bluemix, IBM Watson Cognitive computing,” Dr Pocher concluded.
PSU Phuket Director Prof Chusak Limsakul added, “We are proud of the Thai teams from PSU and Chulalong-korn that entered the competition. Con-gratulations to the Chulalongkorn team, who won the UPE First Solution Award/Problem C. What they got out of this event is better than a trophy or awards, they have more experience and gained new knowledge, which is the key to their future to help them improve their skills in computer technology and to strength-en ICT for Thailand.”
VSCO Cam is a camera and edit-ing app that allows photography enthusiasts to take photos, edit and share in one complete package.
Although quite sleek and well designed, the app does take some getting used to as it offers a wide variety of features and a sophisticated interface.
VSCO, which stands for Visual Supply Co., built filters and presets for Adobe Lightroom and Apple Ap-erture before it developed its app. The filters emulate film stocks and are sold in packs. VSCO is without a doubt the only company coming close to replicating the look of film in a photo app without making it look gimmicky.
The VSCO Cam camera mode has a toolbar at the top of the screen that lets you toggle the flash, change the display into lines of thirds, a grid, a horizon level or absolutely nothing. Camera mode also allows to lock the white balance, as well as choose a mode that takes photos by tapping the screen instead of the shutter release.
For a camera app, VSCO Cam hosts a rather robust assortment of editing tools. There are 15 editing tools in all, which can adjust the photo’s exposure level, colour temperature, contrast, sat-
uration, cropping, sharpening as well as adding grain and changing the tints of shadows and highlights.
VSCO Cam also offers a range of camera filters referred to as ‘Presets’ that offer a more authentic experience of photo editing. The creators want mobile phone photographers to focus on the composition, the lighting and the subject matter of the photos they are taking as what is interesting, instead of if there are 10 different layers and streaks of light leaking in. With this in mind, VSCO Cam takes film stocks that professional photographers still widely used, for example Kodak Porta, and replicates its tones and colour ren-dition perfectly. The image is matched accurately with its filter, without losing its dynamic range to over-editing. It is the goal of VSCO Cam to make images look real.
Like many other photo apps, VSCO maintains its own camera roll. It is pos-sible to automatically add photos taken with VSCO Cam to your camera roll or keep them separate, and later add in one by one to the VSCO Cam for more intensive editing.
The app can share images across social media platforms including Twit-ter, Instagram and Facebook. However,
VSCO Cam desperately wants users to submit their images to the app’s cen-tral sharing feature, which is an online photo gallery called The Grid. The Grid showcases some gorgeous photography, but it is also curated, which means there is no room to Like, promote or comment on any image.
If you are looking for an alternative to Instagram and would like to produce
VSCO Cam: an easy way to replicate film photography
Chulalongkorn completed a problem first.
The team from St Petersburg State University was awarded the World Champions trophy.
APPLICATION ABCS
more film-inspired images for your per-sonal portfolio, VSCO Cam is definitely for you. More information for VSCO Cam can be found at vsco.co.
Amy Bensema is a long-term Phuket ex-pat with a keen interest in social media and tech. You can email her at [email protected] or check out her photos out on Instagram @phuketstagram.
All hail St Petersburg’s codes
Application ABCs is a new monthly column highlighting the latest in tech, social media and mobile phone applications.
