In the TECH Champion 2021 competition, The Financial Times recognised the most interesting European projects that were developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and attempted to cope with unexpected challenges by taking a creative approach and using new technologies and innovative solutions. The evaluators selected the best projects from more than one hundred nominations, with the Czech project ScioLink (www.sciolink.cz) becoming the winner of one of the nine categories, namely Cybersecurity & IT, thus surpassing other projects, many of which were backed by companies with turnover in the billions of dollars. ScioLink, a testing application jointly developed by Scio and Born Digital, won the Cybersecurity & IT category in the TECH Champion 2021 competition organised by The Financial Times. The startup Born Digital is currently undergoing CzechInvest’s CzechStarter incubation programme.
In connection with the competition, The Financial Times mentions that, according to analysts, the rate of progress made since the second quarter of 2020 corresponds to a standard period of seven years. Therefore, FT and the company Workday set the goal of identifying the European companies that have made the best use of technology in order to adapt their business to the given situation. In the case of ScioLink, the jury was most impressed by the involvement of artificial intelligence and the robustness of the system, which can administer tens of thousands of tests at once.
ScioLink was developed last year in response to the epidemiological situation and the current need to ensure secure and reliable online testing of students. It is a unique solution in the area of secure testing with elements of artificial intelligence (more detailed information is provided in the attached article), which will be available to everyone who decides to take online entrance exams for any of the approximately 80 faculties in the Czech Republic and Slovakia using Scio’s National Comparative Exams during the current academic year. In addition to deployment in the academic environments, ScioLink will eventually be made available to companies and other institutions that are addressing the issue of reliability of online tests or are considering a similar step, such as driving schools, institutions with accreditation programmes and the HR departments of companies dealing with recruitment and training of employees.