Canadian students compete in International Olympiad in Informatics in Egypt

WATERLOO, Ont. (Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2008) -- While the summer Olympics athletes dazzle in Beijing, three University of Waterloo mathematics experts will coach a team of Canada's top high school computing stars in the prestigious International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) to be held next week in Cairo, Egypt.

The four-member student team, along with its UW coaches, leaves on Friday. The IOI competition runs between Aug. 16 and 23.

The names of the competitors on the Canadian IOI team are:
* Hanson Wang, of Toronto, Ontario
* Aaron Voelker, of Smittsville, Ontario
* Robin Cheng, of Coquitlam, British Columbia
* Tom Szymanski, of Windsor, Ontario

To earn the honour to represent Canada, the four students competed earlier this year in the Canadian Computing Competition, run annually by UW's Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing based in the faculty of mathematics.

"Our team is very well prepared and ready to give their best efforts in the competition," says Troy Vasiga, a UW computer science lecturer and director of the Canadian Computing Competition. "We are quite excited to be going to Egypt and our students will be touring parts of Egypt near Cairo including the pyramids and the Nile river."

The other two UW representatives leading the Canadian IOI team are Ian Munro, a computer science professor and Graeme Kemkes, a doctoral student in combinatorics and optimization.

As well, Mary Joy Aitken, senior development officer in the faculty of math, will accompany the team and run a blog, complete with photos and updates, throughout the competition. The blog is located at http://www.mjaitken.blogspot.com/

In 2010, UW will be the first Canadian university ever to host this competition. About 400 of the brightest young people aged 14 to 17 from nearly 100 countries will come to Waterloo to participate in the competition.

The annual week-long competition, which has been held since 1989, features 400 of the world's top computer science high school students, who are selected through national computing contests. About 250,000 young people compete in total each year to represent their country.

The IOI, which was first proposed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is the world's premier high school computer programming competition.

The goals of the IOI are to bring together, challenge, and give recognition to young students from around the world who are the most talented in informatics (computer programming), and to foster friendship among these students from diverse cultures. For further information, visit http://www.ioi2008.org/index.php