Francesco Milizia

Competitive programming

When I was a high-school student, I competed in the Italian — and then, International — Olympiads in Informatics. In 2014 I won first place in the national competition. At the international level, I have been awarded a bronze and a silver medal.

Then, I took part in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), which is a contest for teams, each composed of three students from the same university. When I competed for the first time in 2017, with other two students from Scuola Normale Superiore, our university had never competed before. The first local phase of the competition comprised the teams from south-western Europe; from there we managed to pass to the world finals, where we got the 31st place. The next year we reached the finals again and got the 21st place. At that point I couldn't compete again, but for several years I have been coach of teams of younger students. My accomplishments in the ICPC as a contestant first and as a coach later are summarised in my ICPCid page.

To those looking for interesting problems that combine mathematics and programming, I suggest trying the Project Euler website. This is my Project Euler badge:

Collaboration with the Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

I check the articles that are published in the math journal “Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Scienze”, before they are sent to the typography lab.

Some projects for university exams

For “Calcolo scientifico” of the University of Pisa, I studied and implemented the algorithm described in
M. Aharon, M. Elad and A. Bruckstein, K-SVD: An algorithm for designing overcomplete dictionaries for sparse representation, IEEE Trans. Signal Process. 54, 4311-4322,
with applications to image restoration. My report (in Italian) contains the implementation in MATLAB, and examples of restored images.
For “Laboratorio computazionale” of the University of Pisa, I studied a difficult optimization problem involving both continuous and discrete variables. You can download my report (in Italian).