Academic Director of GobLab UAI tells his experience in Labhacker of the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil

The LabHacker laboratory that works within the Chamber of Deputies aims to articulate a network between parliamentarians, hackers, and civil society that contributes to the culture of transparency and social participation through the management of public data and through a system that can assess parliamentarians discourses through speech analysis.

To learn about how they work and how this system can be implemented in our country is that the Academic Director of GobLab UAI and master’s degree in Computer Science, Andrés Letelier, traveled to work with the researchers of the Brazilian laboratory. This internship was part of the activities of the Public Innovation Labs Network (InnoLabs), funded by the Ibero-American Program of Science and Technology for Development, CYTED, and of which the GobLab UAI is part.

“I highlight how open and welcoming all the Labhacker researchers were. The best part of the experience was working side by side with people with abilities and knowledge different from those of our laboratory,” says Letelier.

After his stay, the Academic Director of the GobLab UAI, argues that the result was very positive since it is not only possible but also “it is easy to integrate our data into the Brazilian system to make a large consolidated database that can eventually continue to grow with data from other countries,” he emphasizes.

For Letelier, this type of collaboration with other centers is essential to achieve the proposed objective of the UAI laboratory, which is to discover and promote better ways of making public policies and approaching other areas of research.

Likewise, the UAI researcher affirms that innovation laboratories in public policies are new and most of the research centers in the area are young. “Each center tends to specialize in a research area; for example, in the GobLab we focus on data science and teaching, while Lab Hacker works mainly on open data and crowd law issues for being part of the Brazilian congress,” he adds.