On Monday, Data Week Leipzig 2026 kicked off at Leipzig City Hall with a packed program focusing on data, digitalization, artificial intelligence, and the challenges of urban development. The conference week was again organized by InfAI, eccenca, the City of Leipzig, and ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig. Over the course of the week, around 600 participants gathered for talks, workshops, guided tours, and, of course, to exchange ideas.

From Monday through Thursday, the ScaDS.AI team was on site at the booth in the City Hall Wandelhalle. They answered visitors’ questions about AI and working with large amounts of data, while also taking the opportunity to network. Visitors were also able to test various demos via the Launchpad.

ScaDS.AI’s contributions to the Data Week program

The first day of Data Week Leipzig was dedicated to the digital city of tomorrow with low-threshold open data solutions, sustainable data archiving, responsible AI governance, and networking around climate-innovative approaches. In the afternoon session on “Digital data lifecycles”, Dr. Thomas Burghardt, lead of the Living Lab Leipzig gave a talk. In “Modern OCR methods for handwriting and labels in the German-speaking context” he examined the data lifecycle in the field of handwriting recognition and shows how it can advance both research and practice. He introduced a publicly accessible dataset that is freely available to esearchers in linguistics, computer science, and related disciplines.

Since the presentation was recorded, you can rewatch it on YouTube:

On Tuesday, Dr. Robert Haase shared his expertise on the topic “How Generative Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Work and Study” during a fully booked workshop. After an introduction to generative AI, large language models, and prompt engineering, he guided participants through several hands-on exercises. The slides from his presentation and the link to the exercises are available in German on Zenodo: Wie Generative Künstliche Intelligenz Arbeit und Studium verändert

We are delighted to have been part of Data Week once again and to have seen such keen interest in our work. A big thank you goes out to all the organizers and all our colleagues who helped make the event a success.