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CSE Students Akash Singh and Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov named MLH Top 50 Hackers for 2020

February 10, 2020

Major League Hacking named CSE students Akash Singh and Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov two of the top 50 hackers. MLH is the official student hackathon league which powers almost 2,000 competitions and each year they choose the top 50 hackers out of nearly 100,000  hackers/mentors/organizers to be in the Top 50 hackers list. This year USF was one of 10 universities to have more than one student featured in the list.

Singh

Singh’s first hackathon was MangoHacks, after which he changed his major from biology to computer science. Now, Singh is a research assistant in the USF Graphics and Visualization Lab and the president of Society for Competitive Hackers. 

"Hackathons are an experience rather than a competition...We get an environment to test our skills, gain new ones and most importantly meet programmers from all over the world. The experience itself boosts your confidence and introduces you to the world waiting for you once you graduate,” Singh says. In the future he hopes to pursue his PhD in computer science with a concentration in Data Science and Data Visualization. To find out more click here. 

Mirzakhalov

Mirzakhalov’s first hackathon was MangoHacks in 2017. In 2018, he co-founded the Society of Competitive Programmers where he served as a treasurer, then as a president.“For the last couple of years, we have been working towards the goal of creating a strong hacking community within USF. Over time, I think these efforts have been noticed by MLH as USF ranked 44th in the nation and 2nd in Florida this year. I just hope that these collective and individual awards inspire more students to get involved with hackathons and CSE clubs on campus,” says  Mirzakhalov.

Currently, he works as an undergraduate research assistant in the Social Computing Research Lab. After completing his degree, Mirzakhalov hopes to get his PhD in computer science with a focus on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). To find out more click here.