EU Datathon 2022 teams behind the apps: Meet EMMA
‘The teams behind the apps’ is a series of videos made by the EU
Datathon [/op.europa.eu/eudatathon] finalists. Get to know this
year’s teams and their apps over 12 episodes, twice per week, in the
run-up to the competition finals. On 20 October, the teams will pitch
their apps to the jury that will select the winners. The audience will
also have a chance to support their favorite team in the Public Choice
Award vote. Register now to follow the finals online!
[https://scic.ec.europa.eu/ew/register/dgscic/EU_Datathon_2022/e/lk/g/43770/k/]

 

‘Emma Monitors Malicious Activity’ (EMMA) is a prevention and
early detection tool against fraud. It enables public institutions,
journalists and civil society to automatically control the
relationship between parties in public procurement. The one-man team
behind this app, Marc Fouqué, joined us for a short interview in
which we talked about the app, the idea that led to its creation and
why he decided to participate in the EU Datathon.

 

HOW ARE YOU DOING WITH THE APP? WHAT’S THE STATUS?

A lot of things have been done but there is still more to do. The goal
is to have a minimal working system at the end of the summer, even if
it has limited data compared to what I planned. The database and the
reasoner (a piece of software able to infer logical consequences from
a set of facts) will always be a work in progress, with new datasets
and new kinds of data to be added. The front end is not the best that
we can find out there, but I will give my all in the final stretch to
make it sexy.

 

HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE IDEA FOR THIS APP?

People who know me will say that I am always angry, but actually I am
not just angry; I am also hungry, hungry for more justice, more
democracy, more equality. At my level, one of my strongest assets is
my set of computer skills, so I decided to try to build a system that
can improve this big thing that we call democracy.

At the same time, every day (like always) the news carries reports
about public representatives doing shady things, often with public
money, so I chose to build a system allowing everybody to monitor the
links and actions of public representatives, based on open data and
mandatory public information. When I began, I wondered why nobody had
done this before. Now I know: because it consumes time and energy,
changes very fast and the volume of the dataset is mind-boggling.

 

WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO TAKE PART IN THE EU DATATHON?

Once I had a good idea of the system I wanted to build, I started
looking for datasets. While wallowing in all the available data, I
ended up with forty tabs open on data.europa.eu, with one of them
linked to the EU Datathon website – and there I was, watching the
team presentation videos at 3 a.m.

I quickly understood that my subject was too vast to be covered in one
go and needed to be narrowed down: that is where the EU Datathon
challenge 2 (‘Transparency in public procurement’) came into the
picture. After a night of searching and testing around the field of
public procurement, I decided to go for this as a first step – and
what a step it has been!

Competing in the EU Datathon helps me to commit to the project by
focusing my motivation and pushing further without checking out to
another branch or project (git pun intended).

 

To find out more about EMMA, watch this 1-minute video.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jokN2NcsxCA]

Curious to learn more? Discover the teams and the apps on the EU
Datathon website [https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eudatathon] and follow
their updates on Twitter [https://twitter.com/EU_opendata], Facebook
[https://www.facebook.com/data.europa.eu] and LinkedIn
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/publications-office-of-the-european-union/]
or via our newsletter [https://data.europa.eu/en/newsletter].

Publication Date/Time
2022-09-06T06:50:58+00:00
The one-man team working on a tool to prevent and detect fraud in
public procurement