A view of the Cini Foundation in Venice in the early days of Odoma. Photo: Laurent Bolli
THE PERFECT SYMBIOSIS OF AI AND UX
“Recent developments in AI are bringing exciting new possibilities,” says Laurent Bolli who founded the AI and UX studio Odoma in 2016 together with Giovanni Colavizza. “Tasks that could previously only be done slowly and manually, can now be automated and scaled. Nevertheless, several applications remain challenging even for modern AI techniques.” One example he gives, among many others, is high-accuracy text recognition from handwritten documents with complex layouts. “All these problems can be tackled with AI”, he adds, “but necessitate a dedicated approach which, above all, keeps the human at the centre.” Deeply rooted in academic excellence and benefiting from a strong technical background, the team at Odoma provides just that – unique solutions that blend AI and UX 106
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Issue 11 1
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November 2023
to overcome challenges that require active research and development. "We specialise in solving complex problems combining AI and UX in ways that cannot be found elsewhere," Colavizza emphasises. One of their clients is a natural history museum, where Odoma supports the creation of digital catalogues from vast collections of digitised specimens. “We do so by creating bespoke AI workflows able to parse images, extract texts in multiple languages and scripts, and create structured data from them,” Colavizza explains. “Given the historical and domain-specific nature of these collections, a dedicated approach is required.” Odoma is the ideal choice for research groups, industry veterans with rich archives, like watchmakers and private bankers, as well as cultural organisations such as libraries and museums.
At the heart of Odoma's success is its human-centric approach. They don't aim to replace human roles but to augment them, making us more capable than ever before – a winning formula. www.odoma.ch
Mammoth tooth and its historical labels. (Client: Museum für Naturkunde Berlin). Photo: Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
TEXT: MARILENA STRACKE
A true pioneer in its field, Odoma is bridging the gap between artificial intelligence and user experiences. It provides unique AI and UX solutions to master complex challenges where commercial tools don’t yet exist – thus empowering humans to perform ever more ambitious tasks.