ACM ICPC Asia Manila 2009: Introduction

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ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC)
Asia Manila Regional Onsite ContestOctober 22 - 23, 2009Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines
Sponsored by IBM

Website: http://www.math.admu.edu.ph/acm

ABOUT THE ACM ICPC

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is an activity of the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) that provides college students with an opportunity to demonstrate and sharpen their problem-solving and computing skills. This event is supported by IBM.

The contest is a two-tiered competition among teams of students representing institutions of higher education. Teams first compete in Regional Contests, held around the world from October to November each year. The winning team from each Regional Contest advances to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals that is typically held in mid-February to early March. Additional high-ranking teams may be invited to the World Finals as Wild Card teams.

Particularly, the ACM/ICPC Asia Regional Contests invite Asian students to meet, establish friendships, and promote fair competition in programming.

The Asia Region covers all territories and countries in Asia, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Vietnam, Macau, Mongolia, Siberia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Israel, Iran, Middle-Eastern, and Central Asian Countries, etc. Asia Regional Contests do not divide the region by political territories. A team that advances to the Contest Finals represents the team's university, not the team's political boundary.

The founder director of the Asia Regional Contest is Dr. C. Jinshong Hwang, professor of computer scienceat Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, USA. Prof. Hwang started with a single Asia Regional Site in Taiwan in 1995. This year (2009) there are 15 Regional Sites in Asia, namely:

• Amritapuri
• Asia Dhaka
• Asia Gwalior-Kanpur
• Asia Harbin
• Asia Hefei
• Asia Hsinchu
• Asia Jakarta
• Asia Manila
• Asia Ningbo
• Asia Phuket
• Asia Seoul
• Asia Shanghai
• Asia Tehran
• Asia Tokyo
• Asia Wuhan
  

ACM/ICPC has received major sponsorship from IBM since July 1997 for World Finals events, ICPC organization and regional contest activities, and most of the software used for Regional Contests. IBM also provides additional funds available to support part of the regional contest activities for each site.

This year (2009) is the third time that Ateneo de Manila University will host an ACM ICPC Asia Regional event. The first time was in 2005 and the second time was in 2006.

In 2005, a Philippine team qualified for the first time to compete in the ACM ICPC World Finals held in Shanghai, China. The team, Res Cogitans, consisted of three students from Ateneo de Manila University (Carlos Miguel Arguelles, Allan Espinosa, and Mark Punzalan) with Dr. Pablo Manalastas of the Ateneo Department of Information Systems and Computer Science as coach. In 2006, the Linden Boyz (Mark Punzalan, Allan Espinosa, and Chistopher Rigor) from Ateneo de Manila University qualified for the ACM ICPC World Finals held in April 2005 in San Antonio, Texas, USA.

The next ACM ICPC World Finals will be held in Harbin, Chinal on February 1 - 6, 2010.

Dr. Rafael P. Saldaña
Contest Director
ACM ICPC 2009
Asia Manila Site

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