The topic of the Maritime Cluster Norddeutschland event on April 23 was “Innovative algorithms for shipping and logistics: How automatic text extraction and quantum computing will change business processes”. 40 participants met in the premises of the Business Club Hamburg, the Villa im Heinepark on Elbchaussee to hear fascinating presentations about the promises of digitisation in the shipping industry.

Jan Herberg, CEO of our partner of many years Herberg Systems GmbH, showed how automatic information extraction from email requests enables the digitisation of workflows for shipping logistics. Dr. Kilian Foth, Team Lead Text Analytics at LangTec demo’ed LangTec’s EmailReader and showed how AI-based semantic text analysis can obtain structured business data from various kinds of unstructured documents and messages.

Oliver Szal and Joshua Dibbern from FraunhoferCML showed that competitive quantum computing has already arrived: the audience chose the parameters of a “Maritime Inventory Routing Problem” that was then solved twice over (locally and by a quadratic annealer in Canada) with the same time budget, and the quantum algorithm D-WAVE found the higher-value solution than classical CPLEX optimization.