IT youth award 2007

Part 2 - Abstract or Summary of IT accomplishment/research/project

As a computer science student, I have always been keenly aware of the misconceptions the general public has about this field. Computer science is more than just writing codes on computers; it is about designing solutions to problems which can be executed efficiently. To quote the words of Professor Edsger Dijkstra, ``Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.’’ . My goal is to interest young people to learn computer science and discover its elegance and beauty.

Organizing IT competition is certainly one of the most effective ways to motivate students to learn more about computer science. Competitions provide an avenue for students to showcase their skills, interact with other students with similar interests and compare themselves with others. In my opinion, competitions should also be innovative and inspire students to continue to improve themselves.

I have contributed to a number of local IT competitions such as Computron and the National Olympiad in Informatics. I was the chairperson of the scientific committee in Computron 2004 and as part of my duties I developed the problems sets used during the programming round. For Computron 2006, I proposed a new competition format to replace the existing programming round. The new format was successfully implemented by the organizers and feedback from the contestants indicated that it made the competition more exciting and competitive as now they had to devise programs to ``battle’’ against the other contestants’ programs.

Beyond the local competitions, I have also been actively involved in organizing and coaching the students who take part in international competitions, such as the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), since 2004. I have had the honor of being part of the Singapore delegation at the IOI in 2005 and 2006. In order to facilitate the growth and continual success of our students in Informatics competitions, I have created a website at \url{http://judge.ip.mysoc.net/wiki/} to maintain and archive the training materials we have developed over the years. This is integrated with an online automatic judging system which is based on an open source contest management system, Mooshak (\url{http://www.ncc.up.pt/mooshak/}).

Besides being involved in Informatics competitions, I am also a beginning researcher in the field of Computational Biology. I am currently working on several research projects in the areas of phylogenetics and comparative genomics. Recently in June/July 2006, I was a member of the organizing committee for a two month Algorithmic Biology program (\url{http://www.ims.nus.edu.sg/Programs/algorithmicbiology/index.htm}) jointly organized by the Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the School of Computing.

Part 3 - Description of Contribution

How have you contributed significantly to the above mentioned accomplishment and/or the development of new or improved IT-based learning resources, services or applications?

The organization of competitions such as Computron and National Olympiad in Informatics is a group effort which involves an organizing committee, which is sub divided into a scientific committee and a technical committee.

My primary focus in these competitions is on the scientific aspects, i.e. the development of interesting problem sets and innovative competition formats which will be able to engage and interest the students in learning Computer Science. I have also contributed in the technical side of these competitions by developing automated judging programs for both of these competitions to grade the submissions by the students.

At the international level, my contributions are in organizing training sessions and workshops to develop the talent of our students. Since 2005, I have organized an ICPC workshop and an IOI workshop during the May – Aug period to train our students in problem solving and programming. As a member of the Singapore delegation at the IOI, I was part of the general assembly of the IOI and together the general assembly selected the tasks for the competition and voted on long term changes in the IOI.

What is the impact of your contribution towards the establishment of new industrial technology and/or the innovative use of existing technology to develop new or improve IT-based learning resources, services or applications?

I have made use of existing technology such as wikis and an open source contest management system to facilitate the workshops I have conducted. Our wiki site is a publicly available archive of training materials and competition tips we have developed over the years and it also serves as a community site where members can create their own pages and contribute to our knowledge base.

How have your contributions led to further joint ventures/collaboration with schools, institutes of higher learning and/or community in Singapore (if any)?

The workshop we organized for the IOI training is a collaboration between the Ministry of Education, which manages the secondary school and junior college students who takes part in the IOI, and the School of Computing which provides the manpower and facilities to run the workshop.