October 30, 2017 TCO17 Award Ceremony: The Final Day

The last day of TCO17 was on Tuesday, October 24th. In the morning, we had the Design Final 2 Competition which had the design finalists work on same problem as the previous rounds. As the designers had a workshop meeting with students who will use this application, that proved to be very valuable as direct feedback. The morning continued with the Algorithm final, which had a surprising result, considering that tourist was expected to be the winner, but instead he was challenged by scott_wu and lost all his points.
The award ceremony that everyone was expecting started at 4:00 PM. Nick Castillo was the one that introduced Topcoder CEO, Mike Morris, who thanked all the sponsors, BNMC, competitors and Topcoder staff, especially TCO queen Jessie Ford. He was followed by Matt Enstice from BNMC, who thanked everyone for being here and he was the one who introduced the Lt. Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul. Having a political figure to be at TCO, with all the press attention, was a first thing in the history of Topcoder and a important even for the city of Buffalo. She thanked the entire community and was excited to attend this event.
Once she finished her speech, Kevin Hanna, Director of External Affairs from AT&T, took her place on the stage and awarded prizes for kids who took part in the BNMC STEM Video Challenge.
Sam Couch from IBM, announced Sky_ as the Topcoder with Watson hackathon winner.
Then the actual awards began. Nick Castillo offered the Spirit Award prize to talesforce, for all the effort he did for the community. The Spirit Award was started many years ago after we lost a few Topcoder members who passed away. This award is in memory of those members we’ve lost and is given to the member at TCO who best personifies the Topcoder spirit.
We didn’t forget about the man behind TCO as we all gave a big round of applause for quesks or James Marquez in the Philippines, who does all the site and graphics work for TCO site. A couple of other members were particularly mentioned because of helping this year – DaraK, that helped with TCO tasks and ran the Topcoder blog from the community side, Will Price who did the amazing TCO live stream, Cendhika and his wife Ferita, who did all the video introductions, photos and who will make the recap video as well – looking forward to that! Many thanks went to our CAB as well: Birdofpreyru, F0rc0d3r, Ltaravilse, Ravijune, Sky_, Thomaskrantitsas for supporting the community. A big round of applause went to the bloggers, who bring amazing content from TCO to learning: gorbonov, mahestro, talesforce, nickolas, eriantoongko, Egor, charles.lobo and DaraK.
Finally the finalists were announced! We copilots and wireframe trip winners were the first announced. Adroc then talked about the design problem and had Chris Brown, Mike LaManna, Victoria Nardone, from M&T Bank, come on stage. Chris then awarded our TCO UI Design winner: kharm, who won the big prize of $10,000!
Adam had then the UI Prototype finalists on stage and we could all see their latest scoring and the champion: moulyg! Ward Loving, one of our Topcoder software architects, was invited to the stage and he talked about the problem the development finalists had to solve and then awarded the TCO17 trophy prize to birdofpreyru, Sergey Pogodin.
Next, the F2F finalists were lined up and their scores were presented with a lot of tension as usually. The champion chosen is akinwale, Akinwale Ariwodola. Congratulations! They were followed by the Marathon Match finalists, whose results were pretty much known, but we also saw the final system test and again the champion who kept his throne was Psyho. The members awards ended with the Algorithm finalists and a new champion xudyh, Yuhao Du.
Another round of thanks went from Nick Castillo to the sponsors, and lastly but not least, to the Topcoder Open Queen, Jessie Ford who went above and beyond to plan, organize the event, have all members onsite and made sure the event run smoothly. The staff and community awarded her with her own TCO trophy and flowers. Thank you Jessie!
TCO17 was an excited event and it went by too fast. Here’s to TCO18! Hope to see everyone again.
To see more details about the awards ceremony check the video: https://tco17.topcoder.com/videos/
Check out the photos as we keep adding them:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/53993064@N03/albums
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https://tco17.topcoder.com/blog/