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Handwritten to Data

Event artwork for Handwritten to Data

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Ministry of Economy of UkraineUkrainian Catholic UniversityMinistry of Digital Transformation
About this event

What to expect

Handwritten to Data is a pioneering AI/ML competition tackling one of Ukraine's most pressing digitalization challenges: building open, scalable tools for recognizing Ukrainian handwritten documents. Organized by AI HOUSE in partnership with the Ministry of Economy, Ukrainian Catholic University, and the Ministry of Digital Transformation, this competition offers participants the chance to develop solutions that will directly impact real-world government services like eDozvil and accelerate the delivery of digital public services across Ukraine.

The Challenge

Participants will build AI models capable of recognizing diverse Ukrainian handwritten documents—applications, certificates, logs, signatures, stamps, and archival materials. Unlike typical academic competitions, the solutions developed here have the potential for immediate implementation in government processes, helping digitize state services and simplify document processing at a national scale.

The competition runs in two distinct stages:

Online Stage (April 16 - June 15, 2026): An open competition hosted on Kaggle with no separate registration required. Participants develop handwritten text recognition models trained on a unique dataset of Ukrainian handwritten documents from state archives, universities, and other institutional sources. Results are automatically evaluated on the platform, allowing teams to iterate and improve their solutions throughout the competition period.

Offline Final (July 4, 2026 in Kyiv): Top-performing teams from the online stage will present their solutions in person, demonstrating model performance, reproducibility, and real-world application potential to a panel of experts and government stakeholders.

Who Should Participate

This competition welcomes AI/ML engineers, data scientists, and researchers working with Computer Vision, OCR/HTR, and image/text processing. Students in technical fields, Ukrainian and international startups, R&D teams, and university labs interested in practical AI applications for document processing and public data will find this challenge particularly valuable. Teams can consist of 2-5 people, though individual participation is also permitted.

What You'll Gain

Beyond the $7,000 prize pool, participants gain access to mentorship from leading experts in computer vision and OCR/HTR, including Dmytro Voitekh (AI Advisor at the Ministry of Economy), Roman Kyslyi (Head of NLP at KSE

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