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Canadian students compete in International Olympiad of Informatics in Egypt
WATERLOO, Ont. - While the summer Olympics athletes dazzle in Beijing, University of Waterloo mathematics experts will coach a team of Canada's top high school computing stars in the prestigious International Olympiad of Informatics (IOI) to be held next week in Cairo, Egypt.
The four-member student team, along with its UW coaches, leave on Friday. 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.
The names of the competitors on the Canadian team in the IOI competition, which runs between Aug. 16 and 23, are:
* Hanson Wang, Toronto, Ont.
* Aaron Voelker, Smittsville, Ont.
* Robin Cheng, Coquitlam, B.C.
* Tom Szymanski, Windsor, Ont.
As well, Mary Joy Aitken, senior development officer in UW's 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 the IOI 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 IOI competition, which has been held since 1989, features 400 of the world's top computer science high school students, selected through national computing contests. About 250,000 young people compete in total each year to represent their country.
"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 UW representatives coaching the Canadian IOI team are Ian Munro, a computer science professor, and Graeme Kemkes, a doctoral student in combinatorics and optimization.
The IOI, 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 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 more information, visit http://www.ioi2008.org/index.php or http://www.ioinformatics.org.
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