Ask and You Shall Generate: Building and Answering Questions at Cito with AI
Cito is the Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement - basically, if you've ever taken a final exam in Dutch secondary education, we're the ones who wrote the questions that you had to answer that fateful Tuesday morning.
At Cito, they build a lot of exam questions - hundreds of different exams for secondary school finals in the Netherlands, every year. And hundreds of exams means a lot of questions, so naturally, the question becomes: what if we outsourced most of the repeating work to AI instead? That's what I helped them with - making it possible for Cito's exam constructors to generate and tweak these questions themselves, without needing a battalion of frontend developers standing guard at every gate.
On top of that, they want to know all sorts of things about exams, school-locations and teacher assignments throughout the year - and right now, that curiosity tends to get answered with one-off SQL scripts and heroic Excel gymnastics.
In this talk, I'll share the solutions I've been building to slay these challenges at Cito - because whether it's building questions or answering them, the answer is the same: ask, and you shall generate.
About the speaker
Christian van Dijk
Software Engineer at Cloud Republic. He spends his days building AI driven solutions for Cloud Republic's customers, driving AI adoption within Cloud Republic and their customers alike.
When he's not busy future-proofing Cloud Republic, you'll find him chasing his next concert fix (his gig calendar rivals most touring bards' calendars) or giving back through volunteer work, because even knights need a side quest.
