Business Intelligence participated in the #EUvsVirus hackathon organized by the European Commission in close collaboration with the member states of the European Union, and the Birdbox solution from their team of multidisciplinary experts made it to the finals among the top 10% of projects in the domain of Digital Finance.
In the finals, Birdbox was selected as one of 117 most promising solutions that will participate in Matchathon, which will take place from May 22 to 25, where the PI team will have the opportunity to further enhance their solution through a series of workshops and present Birdbox to potential users and investors.
EUvsVirus hackathon was held from April 24 to 26 worldwide and gathered participants with the same goal – to develop a prototype and solution for technical, political, and socially relevant issues related to the crisis caused by the coronavirus. The competition brought together 20,900 participants from across Europe and beyond, and a total of 2,163 solutions were submitted, with Business Intelligence competing in the challenge titled “Support for Identifying Financial Shortcomings.” The Business Intelligence team consisted of six members, experts in various fields of data collection, processing, analysis, and visualization. The team included Iva Sorić, Davor Dinjar, Josip Puniš, Bernard Curić, Petar Pejaković, and team leader Marko Štajcer.
– This project is a prototype solution that would help EU member states find the optimal strategy for supporting the economy, as our solution will enable them to detect the most critical areas and identify those where the financial aid package would have the best possible impact on preserving jobs and the economy as a whole. The platform also allows for the creation of simulations and testing of various scenarios of the crisis’s impact on the economic activity of individual states or the unified EU market. This solution is applicable not only to the immediate consequences of the current crisis but also in the event of a resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic or another crisis that would again affect the economy. The solution is also applicable for market analysis and risk assessment under different market conditions – said Marko Štajcer, Director of the Innovation and Development Department at Business Intelligence.
After the Hackathon, the solution from Business Intelligence, as one of the selected 117 solutions, will be part of the Matchathon, which will take place from May 22 to 25, aimed at connecting teams with potential users and investors.
– Our placement in the finals and the invitation to the Matchathon is an additional motivation and incentive for further product development, and we have included other partners in the Birdbox project, and we are particularly pleased that Vuk Vuković, a PhD from Oxford and one of Croatia’s leading experts in political economy, has joined us to better present Birdbox and Croatian innovations at the upcoming Matchathon. We also reached out to FINA requesting anonymized data for calculating the COVID score, which would help us further expand the functionality of the application. FINA confirmed their support, noting that these are sensitive data and that special attention must be paid to data security and processing methods due to regulatory requirements. Our desire is that in the future, if the project becomes a commercial product, we enable Croatian institutions to use Birdbox free of charge – added Štajcer.
