Today The Tor Project announced that it has elected a new Board of Directors, and among them is HRDAG executive director Megan Price. The Tor Project is a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes online privacy and provides software that helps users opt out of online tracking.
Megan and Patrick have long maintained that encryption and privacy are essential for enabling human rights work. Patrick's ideas are described in Monday's FedScoop story about encryption, human rights, and the U.S. State Department.
“Human rights groups depend on strong cryptography in order to hold governments accountable," says Patrick. "HRDAG depends on local human ...
At HRDAG, we worry about what we don't know. Specifically, we worry about how we can use statistical techniques to estimate homicides that are not observed by human rights groups. Based on what we've seen studying many conflicts over the last 25 years, what we don't know is often quite different from what we do know.
The technique we use most often to estimate what we don't know is called "multiple systems estimation." In this medium-technical post, I explain how to organize data and use three R packages to estimate unobserved events.
Click here for Computing Multiple Systems Estimation in R.
Valentina Rozo Ángel has joined our team as our new visiting analyst this fall.
On September 7, 2018, Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball participated in a panel at Disrupt San Francisco by TechCrunch. The talk was titled "Dismantling Algorithmic Bias." Brian Brackeen of Kairos was part of the panel as well, and the talk was moderated by TechCrunch reporter Megan Rose Dickey.
From the TechCrunch website, "Disrupt is a 3-day conference focused on breaking technology news and developments with big-name thought leaders who are making waves in the industry."
Video of the talk is available here, and Megan Rose Dickey's coverage is here.
Illuminating Data's Dark Side: Big data create conveniences, but we must consider who designs these tools, who benefits from them, and who is left out of the equation.
We’re pleased to announce that Camille Fassett has joined our team as our new data science fellow.
How do police officer booking decisions affect pre-trial risk assessment tools relied upon by judges?
But while HRDAG’s estimate relied on the painstaking efforts of human workers to carefully weed out potential duplicate records, hashing with statistical estimation proved to be faster, easier and less expensive. The researchers said hashing also had the important advantage of a sharp confidence interval: The range of error is plus or minus 1,772, or less than 1 percent of the total number of victims.
“The big win from this method is that we can quickly calculate the probable number of unique elements in a dataset with many duplicates,” said Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s director of research. “We can do a lot with this estimate.”
Following a brutal 11-year civil war, the Parliament of Sierra Leone called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to create "an impartial, historical record of the conflict", and "address impunity; respond to the needs of victims; promote healing and reconciliation; and prevent a repetition of the violations and abuses suffered." The full text of the TRC report is available on the Sierra Leone Web.
HRDAG assisted the TRC to build a systematic data coding system, electronic database, and secure data analysis process to manage the thousands of statements given to them in the course of their work. Dr. Ball visited Freetown twice, and HRDAG ...
Solving for X documents Patrick's team as they travel to Guatemala, Kosovo, and Liberia, helping human rights supporters apply sophisticated computer analysis to human rights events.
The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.
In our work, we merge many databases to figure out how many people have been killed in violent conflict. Merging is a lot harder than you might think.
Many of the database records refer to the same people--the records are duplicated. We want to identify and link all the records that refer to the same victims so that each victim is counted only once, and so that we can use the structure of overlapping records to do multiple systems estimation.
Merging records that refer to the same person is called entity resolution, database deduplication, or record linkage. For definitive overviews of the field, see Scheuren, Herzog, and Winkler, Data Quality ...
In Louisiana, appeals for police disciplinary action are often buried in meeting minutes. HRDAG uses machine learning to extract, structure data and make it searchable..
