Megan Price, Morgan Agnew, and David Peters (2020). How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests? Granta. 28 April 2020. © Granta Publications 2020.
Megan Price, Morgan Agnew, and David Peters (2020). How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests? Granta. 28 April 2020. © Granta Publications 2020.
Bailey joined HRDAG as a data scientist in 2022.
Ten years ago, in July 2005, human rights officers stumbled upon a nondescript warehouse in a commercial zone of Guatemala City and changed history. They had discovered an archive–its existence kept secret–belonging to the Guatemalan National Police, whose officers committed human rights atrocities on behalf of the government during the civil war.
Inside the building was the bureaucratic detritus typical of a large government agency: 80 million pages detailing shifts worked, tasks assigned, assignments fulfilled, workers’ whereabouts, and who was supervising whom. The documents, which were found stacked on dirty floors, shoved into bags, ...
The World According to Artificial Intelligence: Targeted by Algorithm (Part 1)
The Big Picture: The World According to AI explores how artificial intelligence is being used today, and what it means to those on its receiving end.
Patrick Ball is interviewed: “Machine learning is pretty good at finding elements out of a huge pool of non-elements… But we’ll get a lot of false positives along the way.”
Kristian Lum, Erwin Ma and Mike Baiocchi (2017). The causal impact of bail on case outcomes for indigent defendants in New York City. Observational Studies 3 (2017) 39-64. 31 October 2017. © 2017 Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Kristian Lum, Erwin Ma and Mike Baiocchi (2017). The causal impact of bail on case outcomes for indigent defendants in New York City. Observational Studies 3 (2017) 39-64. 31 October 2017. © 2017 Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Patrick Ball (2016). The case against a golden key. Foreign Affairs. September 14, 2016. ©2016 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Patrick Ball (2016). The case against a golden key. Foreign Affairs. September 14, 2016. ©2016 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Historic Archive of the Guatemalan National Police (hereafter the Archive) was discovered, quite by accident, in July 2005. Researchers immediately recognized both the importance and the fragility of the Archive's contents. As a result, in early 2006 the Archive team invited Patrick to evaluate the documents and help them answer a seemingly simple question: How can we learn about the contents of the Archive in a shorter period of time than is needed to systematically examine each individual document?
After inspecting the Archive, Patrick designed a multi-stage random sample of documents. In May 2006, Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, and ...
In a CNN interview predicting a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Henrik Urdal from PRIO talks about his shortlist and HRDAG.
Doing an investigation on the contents of the Archive brought with it three major lessons. The first big lesson was the constant movement (nothing was static), The second great lesson was that everything evolved (the changes were a constant). The third major lesson was to discover how two institutions can work together while geographically far apart.
The constant movement
As there were other processes being carried out at the Archive, everything was in constant movement. In other words, one day the documents were in X location and tomorrow they may be in location Y or dispersed in multiple locations. This made it impossible to know with certai...
This morning I got a query from a journalist asking for our data from the report we published yesterday. The journalist was hoping to create an interactive infographic to track the number of deaths in the Syrian conflict over time. Our data would not support an analysis like the one proposed, so I wrote this reply.
We can't send you these data because they would be misleading—seriously misleading—for the purpose you describe. Here's why:
What we have is a list of documented deaths, in essence, a highly non-random sample, though a very big one. We like bigger samples because we think that they must be closer to true. The mathematical justificat...
The data science field is always changing, which means that I'll always be learning.
What follows is an elaborate criss-crossing of collaborations—retreat is a time to embrace the productivity that comes with being in the same room.
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This past year at HRDAG has been about continuing efforts to uncover the truth.
Three months after the announcement of the momentous verdict finding former Chadian president Hissène Habré guilty of crimes against humanity, the presiding judges have released the full, written 681-page judgment of the court. Testimony given by HRDAG’s director of research, Patrick Ball, is mentioned at three points in the verdict.
The judges included in their written judgment the HRDAG analysis that the mortality rate in Habré prisons was staggeringly high—much higher than the mortality rate among the population as a whole. Here’s an excerpt from the judgment, page 358 (translated by Google):
The statistical expert, Patrick Ball, ...