The main job of regional contest directors is to organize the regional matches that serve as a springboard to the World Finals.
From problem development to hotel reservations to T-shirt orders, the 43 directors and co-directors from last year had to manage it all.
Tom Capaul, director of the North America Pacific Northwest region, said regional leaders must be willing to make mistakes, balance budgets and delegate tasks.
“It’s a pleasure to get to work with so many smart people,” he said.
His region includes parts of Canada, Oregon and Northern California. When he started working with the regional contests in 2000, the Pacific Northwest regional contest comprised of about 70 teams, he said. This past year – his third as regional director – the meeting boasted 115 teams.
Two teams from his region are world finalists: Stanford University and University of British Colombia.
Capaul said competition around the globe is steadily improving. Juggernauts such as Russia, China and Southeast Asia usually get the most spots at World Finals, but teams from Africa and Latin America are starting to compete at a higher level.
For Dovier Antonio Ripoll Méndez, the regional director’s role goes beyond organizing to mobilizing a community not well-known for computer programming.
The ICPC competition is a great way to promote his native Cuba, Ripoll Méndez said.
“We have coders,” he said. “We have programmers.”
The professor competed in the ICPC regionals in Venezuela in 2007. He wanted to create closer regional contests for future contestants, and founded the Latin American Caribbean region in 2009.
“This is a great competition that involves more than 2,000 universities, so our universities see that it’s a great movement,” Ripoll Méndez said. “It’s a family. It’s very, very, very beneficial to our students because it is motivation to study more computer science, more mathematics, more English because the instructions are in English. So it’s one way to get more international recognition for the universities.”
Last year, 246 teams competed in local Caribbean contests, of which 45 teams competed in the regional contest to get a spot in the World Finals. The regional contestants hailed from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Trinidad & Tobago, and Cuba. Two teams from Havana are world finalists: Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas (University of Informatic Sciences) and Universidad de La Habana (University of Havana).
Ripoll Méndez expects 45 universities to compete in Caribbean contests next year, an increase from 30 universities last year.
"Socially, things are motivating me to continue working in this movement,” he said. “My dream is that the Caribbean – that the 26 countries – compete. All of them.”
Dioni L. Wise for ICPCNews