International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is a computer programming competition in which secondary school students from around 100 country compete during 2 days. Ireland has participated to IOI continuously for the last 20 years, having won numerous medals, e.g. Martin Orr (Belfast) Gold in 2008, David McCarthy (Cork) Bronze in 2012 or Kieran Horgan (Cork) Bronze in 2018 and 2019.
School of Computer Science and Information Technology at UCC is organising since 2019 all the activities related with managing All Ireland Programming Olympiad (AIPO), selecting the Irish panel to participate to IOI, and the final training before IOI. All these activities had been possible last year because of the generous sponsorship of John Sullivan CEO of Interactive Reporting. John participated the IOI Olympiad many years ago, being part of the first Irish team to be involved in this international competition.
The activities for this year AIPO and IOI competitions will start soon with the national programming competition taking place on Saturday 14th of March. For that we are looking to get the IT@Cork members involved in helping with various aspects of the IOI training and AIPO competitions.
Firstly, we would like to ask the people who previously were involved in the national competitions or IOI Olympiads in their own countries to contribute to IOI training. The IT@Cork workforce is multinational and it is likely that some of them had been involved in this type of national or international programming competitions. We will welcome their expertise and ask them to contribute by giving a short tutorial on algorithms, programming or problem solving when we will host the IOI training. We will also appreciate if people interested in proposing programming problems can send us challenging ones, that we can use for the programing competitions we will have to organise this year. Flavour of competition problems can be found at aipo.ucc.ie.
Secondly, we would like to ask the IT@Cork members to sponsor the AIPO and IOI activities. In the AIPO national competition, we have more than 200 students nationwide to compete in the selection round, from which around 40 are selected to participate in the final competition. Then we select 10 students to form the extended Irish panel, from which we will decide on the 4 students, that will travel to the IOI 2020. This sponsorship will be wisely used to cover the prizes for the AIPO finals in both the Junior and Senior section, to organise the final week of the IOI training here in UCC and to cover the travel costs to IOI in Singapore.
Finally, we are very proud to mention that two of the last year IOI participants, Kieran Horgan (bronze in IOI 2019) and Andrew Nash, were from Cork and are now top students in our CS programs.
We will be very happy to discuss further with you about your involvement in the AIPO and IOI and for that feel welcome to contact Dr Sabin Tabirca, the AIPO and IOI coordinator at tabirca@cs.ucc.ie.
