November 17, 2015 : Winners announced from among the best talent in the globe after grueling competition
Indianapolis, IN ? November 17, 2015 ? This past week in Indianapolis, the world's best programmers, data scientists and designers competed head-to-head for global champion bragging rights and cash prizes. Six new champions have emerged from the 2015 Topcoder Open (TCO15), Appirio's year-long global tournament comprised of competitions in competitive programming, application development, and UI design and prototype.
Topcoder is Appirio's crowdsourcing community of almost one million designers, developers and data scientists who compete to solve real-world business problems for customers such as Harvard Medical School, Honeywell, IBM, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
A total of 65 finalists from this community battled for the number one spots in each category. The unique group represented 23 countries across five continents, and included Google professionals, a computer forensic expert for the Brazilian government, a freshman at Harvard University, and community members defending multiple Topcoder Open championship titles. In a typically male-dominated field, eight of the finalists were women – the most in any Topcoder Open Championship competition.
The 2015 Topcoder Open champions are a diverse group of individuals representing six countries. The five men and one woman who charged their way through every TCO15 competition to claim the number one spot in their field are:
TCO15 Algorithm Champion, Petr Mitrichev from Russia. Petr has attended TCO for more than a decade and is a three-time TCO Algorithm Champion.
TCO15 Information Architect Champion, Silvana Vacchina from Spain. Silvana uses her skills to work on spaceship tracking and security systems, quite literally helping Europe's Spaceport achieve its current missions.
TCO15 Marathon Champion, TianCheng from China. TianCheng works on Google's self-driving car initiative, and has appeared at TCO 9 consecutive times.
TCO15 Development Champion, Lukasz Sentkiewicz from Poland. Lukasz only learned to code seven years ago, but has surged through the ranks to become one of the best developers in the world, quitting his full-time job to take on Topcoder challenges full time.
TCO15 User Interface Design Champion, Junius Albertho from Indonesia. Junius has been involved in Topcoder since college, and is a three-time UI Design champion.
TCO15 Prototype Champion, Dileepa Balasuriya from Sri Lanka. Dileepa is a three-time TCO finalist.
For more information about Appirio's enterprise crowdsourcing community, please visit: http://appirio.com/services/crowdsourcing/

About Appirio
Appirio is a global services company that helps customers compete and win in the new cloud economy. As the leader in enterprise crowdsourcing, we deliver unmatched customer value by combining the world's top talent with a unique cloud services platform. Our platform harnesses the power of one of the world's largest crowdsourcing communities, thousands of ready to deploy assets, and leading cloud, industry and technical experts, to help our customers drive competitive advantage. Appirio is a trusted partner to some of the world's largest brands, including Cardinal Health, Coca-Cola, eBay, Facebook, Georgia-Pacific, Home Depot, Moen, and Sony Playstation.