A competition is being launched in Ukraine for developers who must teach artificial intelligence to read handwritten government documents and automatically convert them into structured digital data.
A competition is being launched in Ukraine for developers who must teach artificial intelligence to read handwritten government documents and automatically convert them into structured digital data.
According to the press release of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, the Handwritten to Data challenge is to bring together machine learning engineers, data scientists, startups, R&D teams, and students around an applied problem for the state. Participants are invited to create models capable of recognizing Ukrainian handwritten text in documents and translating it into a format suitable for further work in electronic systems.
The problem that the competition is aimed at is quite practical. Archival certificates, applications, journals and other documents in the public sector often remain only in paper form. Because of this, some of the data has to be transferred manually, which takes a lot of time, slows down the launch of new services and increases the risk of errors. In fact, this is a bottleneck that blocks the faster digitalization of certain processes in the state.
The competition will be held in two stages. The first will be held online on the Kaggle platform, where participants will work with an open dataset of government documents and train their models. For this, they will be provided with AWS credits. The second stage is an offline final in Kyiv, where the best teams will present their solutions to the jury and representatives of the ministries.
The total prize pool is $7,000, which will be divided between the three best teams. You can apply independently, with an already formed team of two to five people, or find partners within the framework of the challenge. The start of the competition is scheduled for April 16, and the final is scheduled for July 4.
Mentoring support for participants will be provided by experts from Superhuman, KSE, UCU, and the Ministry of Economy. The challenge itself is implemented by AI HOUSE together with the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Agrarian Policy, and UCU, with the support of the Ministry of Digital Affairs.
If the teams can show working models, the state will not just get another competition, but a potential tool to accelerate the digitization of archives. This means faster access to data, less manual work for officials, and less chance of errors when transferring information from paper to electronic systems.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how the engineering challenge «Drone with Paws» took place, organized by Brave1 as part of the Brave Students initiative. The winners were student teams from KPI, Khai, and DonNTU, who shared the prize fund of UAH 90,000.
