Keymakr contributes to RUKOPYS, the first open dataset of Ukrainian handwritten text

Keymakr became the official labeling partner for RUKOPYS, the first comprehensive annotated dataset of Ukrainian handwritten text.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, May 25, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Keymakr, a global provider of high-quality AI training data solutions, became the official labeling partner for RUKOPYS, the first comprehensive annotated dataset of Ukrainian handwritten text. The RUKOPYS dataset covers 100+ years of Ukrainian handwriting, from archived 1920s documents to modern notebooks.

RUKOPYS addresses a key gap in Ukrainian AI development, which, despite being one of the most widely spoken Slavic languages, has historically lacked large-scale open datasets for handwriting recognition.

A treasure trove of Ukrainian handwriting

The dataset was initiated by the Ministry of Economy, Environment, and Agriculture of Ukraine, with the support of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, in collaboration with the Ukrainian Catholic University and the Ukrainian non-profit organization AI HOUSE, which builds the largest AI community in Ukraine.

RUKOPYS combines materials collected in collaboration with national institutions, universities, and archival organizations. It is fully anonymized and released under an open license for research and education, making it accessible to developers, researchers, and institutions worldwide. Keymakr supported the RUKOPYS creation process through expert manual annotation by in-house experts.

The project required careful handling of complex handwritten data, including variations in scripts, degradation of archival materials, and differences in formatting across decades.

“Our work was focused on structuring handwritten data at the line level with high precision,” said Zoya Boyko, PM at Keymakr. “We performed detailed validation for each text line, followed by accurate transcription and normalization, accounting for inconsistencies in handwriting, spacing, and document quality. Special attention was given to low-legibility cases and historical variations, with multi-stage quality control ensuring consistency across the dataset. This allowed us to convert handwritten content into a format suitable for training OCR and HTR models under real-world conditions. Throughout the project, we closely collaborated with AI HOUSE, discussing edge cases and refining the workflow. We also proposed process optimizations that helped improve overall efficiency and data quality. Initial expectations were exceeded, resulting in a treasure trove of valuable data for Ukrainian model training.”

Real-world AI development through open datasets and national initiatives

RUKOPYS serves as the foundation for the Handwritten to Data AI Challenge, an open competition where participants build Computer Vision solutions to recognize applications, certificates, logs, signatures, stamps, and archival documents. The challenge is designed to identify and implement the best-performing solution into the ePermit system, helping optimize Ukrainian ministry workflows and streamline administrative processes.

AI/ML engineers, data scientists, researchers, engineering students, startups, R&D teams, and university labs gained access to RUKOPYS, the ability to use Amazon Web Services to train models, and the chance to test solutions in practical scenarios, with the potential for integration into government platforms.

The Handwritten to Data AI Challenge aims to accelerate document processing, improve accessibility of archival data, and support the next phase of digital transformation in public institutions.

“Converting paper-based collections into structured datasets and incorporating them into publicly available sources and benchmarks is, in essence, a strategic objective,” said Dmytro Voitekh, AI advisor to the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine and AI/ML Lead at Mriya, and an expert of the AI community AI HOUSE. “ It is not only about training our own models, but also about providing existing flagship models with additional context, which, alone, will improve the quality and volume of Ukrainian-language content online without substantial additional costs. And competition on Kaggle gives everybody a chance to build a model that could potentially become part of the future digitization pipeline of the State Archives, a tool for analyzing homework or student papers, or the "eyes" of one of the key government services.”

Preserving language and cultural heritage

Keymakr’s contribution to RUKOPYS reflects the company’s broader focus on building reliable training data pipelines for complex and challenging AI use cases, while also actively participating in socially impactful and valuable projects where technology can drive meaningful change. Keymakr’s domain expertise, scalable annotation workflows, and rigorous quality assurance enable it to support initiatives beyond commercial applications and to contribute to public infrastructure and digital accessibility.

“Ukraine currently ranks 5th in the world in the development of digital public services and aims to become one of the three world leaders in the use of artificial intelligence in the public sector by 2030. We’re just doing our small part by helping the digitization of documents,” said Inna Nomerovska, Chief Marketing Officer at Keymakr. “Even without focusing too much on future applications, it’s already a powerful initiative for preserving and supporting the Ukrainian language, culture, and historical records.”

About Keymakr
Keymakr is a global provider of AI training data solutions, specializing in data annotation, dataset creation, validation, and data operations for machine learning systems. The company supports organizations building computer vision, multimodal, physical AI, robotics, and LLM-based systems, delivering high-quality datasets through a human-in-the-loop approach and proprietary tools developed within the Keylabs platform.

About AI HOUSE
AI HOUSE is a non-profit organization whose main goal is to build the largest AI community in Ukraine for the birth of new product AI startups, the development of the artificial intelligence industry, and the technology sector as a whole.

Olena Butenko
Keymakr
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