As a data festival for IT enthusiasts the Data Week Leipzig offers a 5-day program revolving around the topics data, digitalization, Artificial Intelligence and challenges in urban development. This year’s event will take place from June 1 to 5, 2026 and is once again co-organized by Institut für Angewandte Informatik e. V, eccenca GmbH and ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig.

In addition to insights into the latest trends and developments in the areas of digital cities as well as the use of Artificial Intelligence, the event week offers participants the opportunity to further their education in workshops and training sessions. Data Week Leipzig invites representatives from government agencies, industry, science, and business to engage in dialogue. Students, trainees, and interested citizens are also welcome to take a look behind the scenes.

Program

This year’s Data Week program will have a focus on climate and energy.

One day of the event week will once again be dedicated to semantics and AI as part of the 14th Leipzig Semantic Web Day (LSWT). Speakers will provide insights into how these technologies can contribute to a sustainable and resilient future. KMI Transfer Day will also be part of Data Week again, offering companies, associations, and non-profit organizations involved in digital transformation and AI implementation a point of contact for accessing scientifically sound findings and results for sustainable and humane work design.

Find the tracks of the event here and the whole program of the data week here.

ScaDS.AI at Data Week 2026

As part of Data Week 2026, ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig will again be part of the program with different contributions. Come meet our colleagues at our booth or during these times and for these presentations:

Modern OCR methods for handwriting and labels in the German-speaking context

Monday, June 1, 2026 | 2:30 pm | Sitzungssaal (Neues Rathaus)| German

Speaker: Dr. Thomas Burghardt

Handwritten texts are not only found in historical archives, but also in modern industrial everyday life – for example, on labels, forms, or protocols. However, their automatic recognition poses particular challenges for data science, especially in German-speaking countries, where freely available, diverse handwriting datasets are rare. In this presentation, we introduce two new, publicly accessible datasets created from 852 handwritten German pages. Both datasets have been published on Zenodo and are freely available to researchers in linguistics, computer science, and related disciplines. The presentation shows how OCR models can be successfully transferred to real-world applications. The contribution combines open data, modern AI methods, and concrete industrial use cases – and shows how handwriting recognition can advance both research and practice today.

The presentation ist part of the session: “Digital data lifecycles: management, archiving, and AI-supported indexing – Live translation available in English.”

How generative artificial intelligence is changing work and study

Tuesday, June 2, 2026 | 1:30 – 3:00 pm | Room 377 (Neues Rathaus)| German

Speaker: Dr. rer. medic. Robert Haase

Modern AI-driven chat apps such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others are changing the way we work unavoidably. For many, this means writing texts or programming more efficiently. Some people overestimate the quality of generated text and may not admit that they have not curated AI-generated text properly. About 20 years ago we had to learn how to “google” properly, today we need to learn how to “prompt”. In this lecture, we will give an insight into various challenges that the current AI revolution is imposing on us and a number of opportunities in this context. The lecture gives examples, tips and tricks for dealing with Generative AI and will be followed by a practical part. It is recommended that you bring your own laptop to take part.

Tour of the Living Lab

Friday, June 5, 2026 | 10:00 and 11:00 am | Living Lab (ScaDS.AI Leipzig) / German

Speaker: Oliver Welz

Registration

The registration for the Data Week Leipzig 2026 is now open. You can purchase your full week or day tickets at the Data Week 2026 Ticket Shop.

Venue

Neues Rathaus
Martin-Luther-Ring 4 – 6
04109 Leipzig