After the relaunch of the meetup format in May 2024, the second event on August 13^th was again a big success. It gathered around 40 interested individuals to discuss the subject of document processing. They actively participated, despite the heat, with questions, discussions, and exciting ideas.

The event started with a warm welcome and a presentation from Oliver Welz. He gave some insights into the work of ScaDS.AI and the Living Lab and explained the idea behind the meetup:
The aim of the event is to create a dynamic exchange platform for local and regional players, and to offer fascinating insights into cutting-edge research. Therefore, the Living Lab invites companies, researchers and technology enthusiasts to discover new perspectives, engage in stimulating discussions and explore potential collaborations. Each Meetup focuses on a pre-defined topic and invites companies as speakers. They shed light on the topic from their daily and operational perspective.

Challenges and how language models can contribute

The program included two keynote speeches. One was given by Christoph Augenstein from KI Manufaktur, who organized the event together with Oliver Welz. His keynote dealt with the main subject document processing as well as document provision. He also introduced their chatbot that tackles the challenges that arise. The second one by David Lojewski from codecentric was a benchmark comparison between classical ML methods on intelligent document processing and Large Language Models. He has shown impressively and on the basis of codecentrics own evaluations that LLMs are useful for a wide range of tasks. In document processing, however, they often cannot (yet) keep up with highly specialized ML methods in terms of the accuracy and consistency of the results. For his talk he introduced and used the document processing system SHERLOQ.

As in the previous edition, the Meetup was rounded off with the “AI success story” series. Matthias Schenk from ExB and Wolfgang Groß from Hallog gave a presentation on “AI in logistics” and discussed how a transport company like Hallog can benefit from intelligent document processing. They talked about their collaboration and provided a practical example of how ExB helps Hallog to automate their document processing workflows and the role AI plays in this.

OpenLab and demos on document processing

The Open Lab session followed, where people could get in touch, discuss and network. In addition to the Living Lab demos to be viewed or explored interactively, a demo showcase on “AI-based document management” was presented and became the basis for lively discussions. It was contributed by Mittelstand-Digital Zentrum Chemnitz (Martin Folz) and showed how AI can support document management. Using the example of an invoice processing process in a company, it was shown how a letter invoice was digitized and then classified by AI. The solution is also transferable to other business processes, wherever correspondence or documents are generated that need to be classified according to their content and made retrievable.

We were delighted with the positive response – even in advance – and are already thinking about the next meetup. It will take place in November 2024. As soon as there are more details, you will find all the information on the Meetup page.