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Fighting corruption with Data Science
In October 1995 became public that Mona Sahlin, a Swedish Deputy Prime Minister and the main candidate to replace Ingvar Carlsson as Prime Minister, was making use of public money for private purposes. Between groceries, two Toblerone bars were found. This incident is now known as the Toblerone affair.
National Congress of Brazil
Tired of seeing Artificial Intelligence applied mostly for advertising but not to benefit the whole population, a group of three Brazilians began in 2016 to analise open governmental data to detect corruption. The project, named after the Swedish scandal, is called Serenata de Amor Operation. “Serenata de Amor”, Portuguese for “love serenade”, is the name of a popular local chocolate brand. Publishing everything under an open source license the goal is to develop means for any person to detect misuse of public money as small as a candy bar. In a few months of work results account for 216 congresspeople reported for suspicious expenses, few thousand of tax Brazilian Reais returned to the government and more than a million detected for further investigation. With roughly 2k stars on GitHub, many people have been following the project and are anxious to know the next steps. It has been pointed as one of the most prominent Brazilian open source projects in 2016.
Perugina, the Italian chocolate
Although so far the focus has been in Brazil, social control is known to be part of any democracy in the world. And we heard Italians may have an interest for an Operazione Perugina and know a bit about corruption.
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Irio Musskopf (@irio)
Felipe B Cabral (@felipebcabral)
https://twitter.com/felipebcabral
Ana Schwendler (@anaschwendler)
https://twitter.com/anaschwendler
Originally published at medium.com/serenata on Apr 24, 2017.