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There are several International Olympiads for secondary school students (for example, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and informatics). These Olympiads are not just a science competition, but a means to care for talent in the particular science.The goal of this paper is to identify the necessary topics important for good results at these international contests, and to compare the contest systems for the countries in South Eastern Europe, in the field of Informatics (Computer Science), as a region that is one of the prominent world regions in the context of high results in the international competitions. Here, we provide comparison through detailed analysis of several countries, and further we present a new approach that may be used to compare the achievements of the countries based on the results that students achieved at these competitions. Finally, we present an application of this approach on the results of some of the discussed countries compared to Macedonia.We strongly believe that the paper will provide a valuable content and approach for the entities involved in the organization of the contests, to measure their results compared to other countries, to use the information for improvement, and to use their achievements to raise awareness among the government institutions and companies in order to get support from them.

Data collection and machine learning are changing the world. Whether it is medicine, sports or education, companies and institutions are investing a lot of time and money in systems that gather, process and analyse data. Likewise, to improve competitiveness, a lot of countries are making changes to their educational policy by supporting STEM disciplines. Therefore, it's important to put effort into using various data sources to help students succeed in STEM. In this paper, we present a platform that can analyse student's activity on various contest and e-learning systems, combine and process the data, and then present it in various ways that are easy to understand. This in turn enables teachers and organizers to recognize talented and hardworking students, identify issues, and/or motivate students to practice and work on areas where they're weaker.

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Most of the activity of the IOI community occurs during the International Olympiad in Informatics (and a couple of weeks around the event). In this report we present “IOI Talks” which is a new initiative to occasionally publish presentations, events, book recommendations, interviews and videos that can be of interest to the broader IOI community. Additionally, we will give an overview of the content for the first event.