Dr. Prashant R. Nair, Associate Director – IQAC, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, showcased AMRITA’s Competitive Programming Initiatives and hosting of International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) as a case study at Asia-Pacific Quality Network (APQN) Annual Academic Conference 2025 held at Hong Kong on 22 November 2025. There were only two presentations from India for the APQN 2025 conference, one from Amrita and another from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), which is the nodal accreditation agency representing India in the APQN. Founded in 2003, the APQN regional network has a membership base of 196 quality assurance agencies from 45 countries striving to enhance the quality of higher education in the Asia-Pacific Region.
Dr. Prashant’s presentation was part of the parallel session on ‘Innovation and Quality in Higher Education Curriculum and Pedagogy in line with Industry Collaboration’. He highlighted the university’s best practice of promotion of competitive programming initiatives, including hosting the ICPC regional contest since 2005. ICPC is a premium competitive programming event considered as the Olympics & World Championships of Collegiate Programming, with annual participation of 70,000+ students in 3400+ universities in 100+ countries spread across six continents. After 18 successful editions, the ICPC Asia-Amritapuri site has emerged as the largest site of ICPC worldwide, with 6000+ participants in the 2024 edition, which is a big jump from 100+ participants in 2005. He stressed the fact that AMRITA has played an important role in promoting and popularizing competitive programming and ICPC in India, and this has contributed in terms of improving employability, industry-readiness, and career progression of engineering graduates in India. Prof. Vipin Pavithran from the Amritapuri campus serves as the Regional Contest Director (RCD) of ICPC @ AMRITA.
Other speakers from this session included Prof. Will W K Ma, Tung Wah College, Hong Kong; Prof. Michael Joseph Dino, Our Lady of Fatima University, Philippines; and Dr. Allen Zhang, Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong with best practices highlighted such as integrating interprofessional education (IPE) into the curriculum, Mixed reality (MR) technology as pedagogy etc. This session was moderated by Dr. Daniel Lee, Registrar, Academic Accreditation and Assessment, Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications (HKCAAVQ), which is the co-host of APQN 2025. During the conference, Dr. Prashant also interacted with Dr. Jagannath Patil, Adviser, NAAC; Dr. Galina Motova, President, APQN; and Dr. Jianxin Zhang, Past President, APQN.
