Just as the US government released a new batch of declassified documents last month regarding the JFK assassination, Microsoft began using Machine Learning and AI to make sense of handwritten documents.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Tens of thousands of documents are now available through the US National Archives portal, Archives.gov, which provides JFK researchers with mountains of raw data.

However, many documents are handwritten, and searching through them to find keywords and subjects of interest can be an extremely laborious task when done manually.

According to the Microsoft Commercial Software Engineering (CSE) team, “One of the great advantages of the shift from physical to digital documents is the fast and effective search and knowledge extraction methods now available. Gone are the days of reviewing documents line-by-line to find particular information.”