Team advances to ICPC World Finals, to be held in Dubai in fall 2026
Continuing a long tradition of excellence in competitive programming, a trio of Waterloo students won a silver medal at the 2026 International Collegiate Programming Contest North America Championship, held on March 22, 2026 at the University of Central Florida.
Waterloo stood out among a field that included trios from top universities across the continent. Comprised of Kelly Dance, a graduate student in Combinatorics and Optimization, along with Kevin Guo and Kevin Yang, both fourth-year Computer Science students, Waterloo had an exceptional performance, solving 10 out of 13 problems, to finish second out of 52 teams at the prestigious annual competition.
Left to right: Professor Troy Vasiga, Kevin Guo (4B Computer Science), Kai Wen (Kevin) Yang (4A Computer Science), and Kelly Dance (Combinatorics and Optimization MMath candidate). Photo credit: 2026 ICPC North America Championship
“I am extremely proud of the Waterloo team for a variety of reasons,” said Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Troy Vasiga, who coaches the team alongside his colleague, Professor Ondřej Lhoták.
“They led the competition for the first three hours and were overtaken only in the final two. Kevin Yang and Kevin Guo were on the team last year and did not perform as well as they had hoped. But they brushed themselves off and overcame that disappointment to truly excel this year. Kelly Dance, our third team member, chose Waterloo for his master’s program because of our strong academic reputation, having previously been an ICPC team member for the Colorado School of Mines.”
As a medal-winning team at the North America Championship, Waterloo qualifies for the 2026 ICPC World Finals, to be held November 15–20 in Dubai, UAE, where they will compete against the best teams from universities around the globe.
Top seven medal-winning teams at the 2026 ICPC North America Championship. See full results on the ICPC NAC scoreboard.
Gold, silver and bronze denote medal placement. Dark green indicates first to solve the problem, light green indicates a solved problem, and red indicates an attempted but unsolved problem.
About the ICPC
The International Collegiate Programming Contest is the oldest, largest and most prestigious university-level algorithmic programming contest in the world. Each year, tens of thousands of students from thousands of universities worldwide compete in regional contests for a chance to advance to the World Finals.
Coaches prepare their teams through rigorous training in algorithms, programming and teamwork strategy. During competition, teams of three share a single computer and race against the clock to solve a set of complex, real-world problems within a gruelling five-hour deadline. Success requires not only technical skill, but also communication, strategic thinking and collaboration.
Across the various ICPC competitions, teams of three students represent their university in multiple levels of regional competition. Success at one level leads to an invitation to the next. Only the strongest teams advance to the World Finals, where Waterloo’s 2026 NAC team will represent the university on the international stage.
Waterloo’s history at the International Collegiate Programming Contest
The University of Waterloo is the only Canadian university to have won the ICPC World Finals, taking the prized title in 1994 and again in 1999.
Learn more about Waterloo’s ICPC legacy in “A passion for programming: An interview with Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Ondřej Lhoták,” who was a computer science undergrad on the Waterloo team that clinched the 1999 ICPC World Championship.