Hosting IOI 2013

Introduction

During the time of this history AMT hosted three significant international events.

The first of these was the 1988 IMO. Personally I had little to do with this as it was an AMOC project under Peter O'Halloran. This is described in Chapter 4.

The second was the hosting of the fourth WFNMC Conference in Melbourne in 2002. At present this is not covered in this site but it is my intention to add discussion of it in Chapter 11.

The third was the hosting of the International Olympiad in Informatics in Brisbane in 2013. Whereas the event was held after my retirement and may not otherwise have been included in this history, it was absolutely set up under my stewardship and because most of the preparation for the event was also under my stewardship, and the IOI wanted me to see the event through, and the Board agreed, I will discuss it here.

2009: Early times

In May 2009 Ben Burton, our former IMO Gold Medallist and Director of Informatics Training during most of the life of our program, contacted me in May 2009 to say IOI had no host for 2013 and he had been asked if we could bid. I said there was no hope without an underwriter, the AMT would not wish to, and there was little chance during the bidding period of getting the government on board, even though the government had hosted the other four Olympiads in Australia and I was confident we could get them on board in time.

During the next two months Ben put in an extraordinary amount of work, obtaining a conditional underwriting from UQ (a drop-out clause was there), and support letters for a bid from the Australian Computer Society, Australian Mathematical Society, Google and NICTA, the premier national research organisation in informatics.

I discussed this with Board Chairman Greg Taylor and gained approval to place a bid for the 2013 event. Ben, Bernard Blackham and I went to the 2019 IOI in Bulgaria, via training with the French team in Paris and were jointly able to present our case before the International Committee. We were led to believe that Russia had also decided to place a bid, so we were not super-confident. However we won (as it happened without opposition) and intrepid as we were we celebrated at the announcement. I had given an assurance that even though I was retiring at the end of 2012 I would see this through. A side-effect was that I was to join the International Committee myself until the end of 2014.

We returned to Australia and realised we had a job on our hands. Whereas I was confident we would get Australian Government support, it was decided at the first meeting of our organising committee that UQ, being a recognised leading university, would start the bidding process with government. Our first meeting in October just comprised Greg Taylor, myself, Ben Burton, and from UQ Head of the School of Maths at UQ Professor Halina Rubinzstein-Dunlop and the School's Executive Officer Chris Shannon.

At this stage the day to day people were still likely to be me as AMT Executive Director, coordinating organisation, Ben as our science expert, and Bernard as our technical expert. Bernard is a rather brilliant guy and took on the role of looking for corporate sponsors, preparing and following through on many paths.

UQ wrote to the Queensland and Australian Government immediately and obtained a quick non-negotiable offer from the Queensland Government of $50K, less than Biology in 2004 but at least something. Minister for Education Julia Gillard knocked back, for the time being, any funding from the Australian Government.

2010: Slow development of plans

Two main initial steps were needed at this stage. First, I offered to take over work on the Australian Government. This was the most difficult part of my job, but I was at least familiar with it. Second, AMT was concerned that if this failed UQ had an escape clause. Greg and I decided that AMT had to come in with some underwriting as a basis for removing the escape clause, and negotiated such a joint underwiting with no escape in 2010. It was a sum both organisations could reluctantly fall back on, but was still as I say reluctant.

Greg and I had been given access to UC's professional lobbyists who had helped us get ongoing support for our normal programs for the next three years. A key to this had been the PM's Parliamentary Secretary and the new one was Senator Kate Lundy, who was very supportive. Through her IT adviser we were given access to the Science Minister's adviser, who was also personally helpful, but he told us what we suspected, that there were no discretionary funds available. So began a frustrating period of two years where we got nowhere, moving back and forth between Education and Science and things looked pessimistic.

2011: Appointment of an events person

With the financial side looking gloomy we were trimming our budget back from the original $1.6M. We were committed to the event and it was now necessary to find an events person to take over with logistics planning. The UQ people recommended their events person Andree Phillips, who sounded good, but had never run anything approaching this magnitude before. At this stage she started on a day per week and was soon warming up to the task.

While the ability to run the event logistically was becoming clearer we were still worried about finance and restructured to organisation into two levels. At the top there was a steering committee chaired by Greg Taylor which took a main interest in sponsorship. And at the organisational level we had the main organising committee, chaired by me as Chair of IOI 2013, with all the hands-on people.

2012: Budget pruning

Particularly with Greg's help I continued through most of the year searching government funding channels, but I had now become almost resigned to the fact we may not have any. We commenced working through the budget and did find it relatively easy to prune it to below $1M, some on costs which would not be needed, others by pruning excursions, etc. Rob Moffat was beginning to be helpful by using his supply chain to start to identify ways of support in kind, particularly Dell computers loaning us laptops for nothing. And a generator. Andree was doing very well on all the things I would be worst at.

Towards the end of the year I did see a couple of possible avenues within the government, in particular I suggested to Greg we go and talk to Australia's Chief Scientist, Ian Chubb, and visit Christopher Pyne, Education spokesman for the Opposition, to ensure this issue was expanded.

2013: The Event and Success

I had put in a desperate plea to the Prime Minister in September, and together with our discussions with the Chief Scientist, they resulted in a letter I received from the Science Minister, on the first working day of 2013, and the first normal day of my retirement, inviting me to apply for a certain grant. So I spent the first week of my retirement writing out a grant application to a fund under the supervision of the Chief Scientist.

I was advised by a public servant that it would be better if the applicant was UQ rather than AMT because the Universities were listed as eligible without debate, while there would have been a little discussion about us as we were a Trust under an official University. So after writing the application out I handed my material to Chris Shannon in a form which was ready to go.

We had in my view a very successful meeting of the International Committee in Brisbane in February, and by late March or early April, we were told we were one of just four successful applicants for the grant under the Australian Partnership for Mathematics and Science. In fact we were awarded $500K, which by now covered most of our remaining expected liabilities. We had also received support from the Australian Mathematical Society, the Brisbane City Council and the UQ Alumni, and together with further support Rob Moffatt had garnered from Cisco and other IT sponsors in kind, we were really ready to roll.

All going well, I had expected most of the difficulties would be with visa processing and late team changes. I had arranged with Immigration to be registered as an official event and had been placed in contact with an elite group there which specialised with this. They called themselves the "Dr Who (s)" of the department. These were given the passwords for our registration site and they did an outstanding job in getting everyone through. Everyone, that is, unfortunately, except Libya and Syria, were denied visas by the Australian Government on the grounds that they could not satisfy the government their proposed delegations would return home (other governments had in my experience similarly denied entry to invited delegations on a number of occasions to various IOIs and IMOs for similar reasons). I note that these two delegations were large and included family groups. Some other countries, about 7, also withdrew because of expense problems over the long distance. These countries were mainly from Africa and the Middle East.

Jan Collins had done very well with AMT staff in taking a lot of the administrative burden in areas where it was possible, while Andree took the main brunt of the planning, with an incredible amount of work recruiting and training guides, everything around the campus, ceremonies, excursions, anything that could only be done in Brisbane. She devised some clever methods for avoiding problems of the past, like large queues, waiting long times in buses, a lot of things which were perennial IOI and IMO problems with solutions which made sense.

I arrived at the venue four days early and in that time I was housed in a flat with Bernard and his colleagues setting up the exam room. Bernard is an absolute treasure, and if he had not performed to the level he did, all would have fallen apart. He would have got little sleep for two weeks based on the patterns I saw. Not only did he have a mammoth task in setting up the exam room, which he appeared to achieve without any bother, he was to face even bigger difficulties during the IOI on both exam days.

Unfortunately these days did not go well. Others will have different slants, but I spent most of this time in the engine room and listening to explanations in the General Assembly meetings, and have my own slant. On the first day there was a problem with many high res pictures. It was decided to download these tens of times, one for each language, to each student, on the morning of the first exam. This delayed the exam start by possibly an hour. But worse was to come. An interesting an innovative question took longer than expected to process student submissions, with the outcome that as more and more submissions came in the queue got longer.

For the second day a different type of problem occurred. The General Assembly had, the night before, decided to make changes to one of the problems. This had unforeseen repercussions, causing the start to be delayed again, and further resulting issues during the exam. Andree was by now under real pressure as we had conflicting advice on how to handle changes to eating arrangements and other planned things later in the day, and we were split among five different independent residences to deal with. It is not a good idea to change exam questions at the last minute.

Despite these annoying difficulties, the event was a clear success. One leader got up at the end of the final General Assembly meeting to wish a vote of thanks, naming in particular Ben, Bernard and me, who were the long time well-known personalities from Australia at IOIs. He could have named Andree also. I had never seen this before at any of my 23 IMOs and IOIs but there was a standing ovation which seemed to last an eternity. It must have gone for at least a minute, it may have gone for two, but it was certainly one of the most positively emotional experiences I ever endured.

I close this chapter with four enduring images.

This picture was taken at the opening cocktail party, hosted by UQ Alumni. From left are our technical maestro Bernard Blackham, Madhavan Mukund, of India, Executive Director of IOI, Richard Forster of Great Britain, President of IOI, the very generous UQ Alumni host, my successor as Executive Director of AMT Mike Clapper, our extraordinary events person Andree Phillips, and me as Chair of IOI 2013.

Here I am in the exam room on the day of the first exam.

I presented the top batch of Silver Medals. They included Ray Li of Australia and Andrew Carlotti of Great Britain, who tied with the top two Silver Medals and were the most successful students for their countries. Andrew was interesting as he is a multiple Gold Medal IMO winner.

Richard Forster, President of IOI and me with the top student Lijie Chen, from China.