“Codeforces… assemble!”

We are thrilled to announce Grakn Forces 2020; hosted by Codeforces and sponsored by Grakn Labs. Thank you to Codeforces for providing a world-class competition structure to partner with. We can’t wait to see what you all are capable of. This international competition consists of 1 round, lasting 2.5 hours. The contest will comprise 7-9 problems and will be in accordance with classic Codeforces rules.

Prizes:

• 1st place = 500 euros
• 2nd place = 250 euros
• 3rd place = 100 euros

Additional Prizes:

Top 50 receive:

Grakn Labs swag pack:

• Stickers
• Grakn Labs t-shirt

Random 50 from 51-250 receive:

Grakn Labs swag pack:

• Stickers
• Grakn Labs t-shirt

About Grakn Labs

Grakn Labs is a team of people driven by a purpose: to solve the world's most complex problems, through knowledge engineering. We are the inventors of the Grakn knowledge graph and the Graql query language. Our technology helps organizations in various industries, including Life Sciences, Defence & Security, Financial Services, and Robotics, to build intelligent systems that will change the world. From financial analytics to drug discovery, cyber threat detection to robotics disaster recovery, our technology empowers engineers around the world to tackle a higher order of complexity in knowledge and solve the world's most complex problems.

Based in London, UK, and founded in 2016, Grakn Labs is a team of people driven by a purpose: to solve the world's most complex problems, through knowledge engineering. In 2017, we were awarded Product of the Year by the University of Cambridge. After only a few years, our pioneering community has grown to 6K+ engineers, spread across 10+ countries around the globe -- and we're still growing. To continue pursuing this vision, we need to build a team of individuals who are not just the best and brightest in what they do, but also driven by a strong sense of purpose and compassion for the world.

What is Grakn and Graql?

Grakn is a distributed knowledge graph: a logical database to organize large and complex networks of data as one body of knowledge. Grakn provides knowledge engineering tools for developers to easily leverage the power of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning when building complex systems. Ultimately, Grakn serves as the knowledge-base foundation for cognitive and intelligent systems.

Graql is Grakn's query language. It provides an expressive knowledge schema language through an enhanced entity-relationship model, transactional queries that perform deductive reasoning in real-time, and analytical queries with native distributed Pregel and MapReduce algorithms. Graql provides a strong abstraction over low-level data constructs and complex relationships.

Graql is distributed as an open-source technology, while Grakn comes in two forms: Grakn Core — which is also open-source, and Grakn KGMS — our enterprise Knowledge Graph Management Service, available through Google Cloud and Amazon AWS.

My name is Vlad and I want to tell a story about how I ended up in the Grakn Labs. Before joining, I already worked for a couple of years in Kyiv and right after the graduation from Polytechnic Institute I moved to London to my current position, but it was a long path.

I was never sure if this whole experience is useful in any way for the real world, as a software engineer, up until joining Grakn Labs. ... a lot of attention during the recruitment process is paid to problem solving skills. We have algorithmic problems as part of our interview process and now we want to find our next engineer here on Сodeforces ...

— When did you start competitive coding?

When I was in the ~7-8 grade, my teacher showed us a website with problems and we got very competitive about it. After that, I was participating in math and informatics competitions up until the end of university

— What did you learn/ how did participating in coding competitions impact your skills?

The main impact is boosting logic and STEM-related skills in general. For example, I was not preparing for math or physics competitions explicitly, I didn't 'train' for them in any way, but just from participating in coding competitions, as a bonus, I was taking places in math and physics.

— What's it like working at Grakn Labs as an engineer?

There is a huge difference compared to the rest of the places I worked. I've been a part of 3 different companies in Kyiv and none of them comes close to the level of the community's involvement and interest in Grakn. The majority of engineers I know have a 'job' job and the only goal is to get paid and go home, here we have different attitudes and priorities. We are a team driven by a purpose: to solve the world's most complex problems through, knowledge engineering.

- What type of problems are your working on?

Enterprise programming is significantly different from competitions, it is much more 'slow is smooth, smooth is fast' oriented, but I do have interesting challenges. The project I work on is a tool to test the performance of Grakn (a database). We have to generate data, insert it into the database, make a lot of different queries, measure their speed, correctness and visualize the results in a bunch of charts. It involves a lot of optimizations both on the server and client-side.

We're always looking for the best to round out our team, if you think this sounds like an interesting chance to work on an innovative technology; we'd love to hear from you.