Tired of seeing Artificial Intelligence applied mostly to advertising but not to benefit the whole population, a group of three Brazilians began in 2016 to analyze open governmental data to detect corruption. The project, named after a 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.

As the author of the project, I’m going to walk you through the technology and the context that made Serenata de Amor possible. Since everything is open source, it could be adapted and serve as inspiration for local efforts in the same sense.