We're excited to officially announce our winners!

🥇 1st Place: Brainiac

🥈 2nd Place: Miscusi

🥉 3rd Place: Ynnoj

And our top participant from Barbados

🇧🇧 Motacola

This was an incredibly challenging competition, and we were impressed by the creativity, technical sophistication and dedication demonstrated by participants.

Some interesting insights from the winning solutions:

All three winners used an ensemble approach, combining multiple AI models to tackle the complexities of historical handwriting recognition. But each took a slightly different approach:

• 🥇 Brainiac combined eight different AI reader variants, analysing both complete handwritten lines and individual words before using a weighted voting system to select the best transcription.
• 🥈 Miscusi used a sophisticated combination of AI readers and scorers to generate many possible transcriptions, then selected the one most likely to minimise recognition errors.
• 🥉 Ynnoj combined 24 models with an additional image-based verification step, placing particular emphasis on reproducibility and ensuring results could be reliably checked and repeated.

Thank you to our community!

We've received great feedback from participants who enjoyed both the technical challenge and the opportunity to work on something so meaningful. It's awesome to see AI being applied to help preserve Barbados' historical records and make them more accessible to future generations.

🏅 Your challenge certificates are now available!

All participants can now access their challenge certificates on the challenge page. We'd love to see you share your achievements on LinkedIn and other social platforms! Don't forget to tag Zindi so we can celebrate with you.

A huge thank you to everyone who participated, experimented, shared ideas and contributed to this challenge. And congratulations once again to our winners!