Kristian Lum, Chesa Boudin and Megan Price (2020). The impact of overbooking on a pre-trial risk assessment tool. FAT* '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. January 2020. Pages 482–491. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372846 ©ACM, Inc., 2020.
Kristian Lum, Chesa Boudin and Megan Price (2020). The impact of overbooking on a pre-trial risk assessment tool. FAT* ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. January 2020. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372846 ©ACM, Inc., 2020.
Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s Overestimation of Utility and Risk. Logic(s). 13 December, 2023. Issue 20.
Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s Overestimation of Utility and Risk. Logic(s). 13 December, 2023. Issue 20.
We were surprised and disappointed to learn that our colleague Claudia Paz y Paz has had her term as Guatemala’s attorney general cut short. The nation’s Constitutional Court ruled on 6 February that her four-year term will end this May, instead of in December. (She was appointed in December 2010, replacing an attorney general who was appointed in May 2010.)
During her term, she put four generals from Guatemala’s civil war on the stand for charges of crimes against humanity and genocide, including General José Efraín Ríos Montt, who ruled from 1982 to 1983. We were fortunate to work with her on that trial and to witness the handing down of a ...
Suddeutsche Zeitung writer Mirjam Hauck interviewed HRDAG affiliate Anita Gohdes about the pitfalls of relying on social media data when interpreting violence in the context of war. This article, “Kriege und Social Media: Die Daten sind nicht perfekt,” is in German.
James E Johndrow, Kristian Lum and D B Dunson (2018). Theoretical limits of microclustering for record linkage. Biometrika. 19 March 2018. © 2018 Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/biomet/asy003.
John E Johndrow, Kristian Lum and D B Dunson (2018). Theoretical limits of microclustering for record linkage. Biometrika. 19 March 2018. © 2018 Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/biomet/asy003.
From the article: “As we seek to advance the responsible use of data for racial injustice, we encourage individuals and organizations to support and build upon efforts already underway.” HRDAG is listed in the Data Driven Activism and Advocacy category.
Tarak Shah is quoted with regard to the National Police Index: “Police often avoid accountability by moving to another agency rather than face discipline. This tool, allowing anyone to look up and track the histories of such officers, provides an invaluable service for the human rights community in our fight against impunity.”
Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball (2019). Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992). Demographic Research, 1 October 2019. © 2019 Demographic Research. DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27
Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball (2019). Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992). Demographic Research, 1 October 2019. © 2019 Demographic Research. DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27
William Isaac and Kristian Lum. Predictive policing violates more than it protects. USA Today. December 2, 2016. © USA Today.
William Isaac and Kristian Lum. Predictive policing violates more than it protects. USA Today. December 2, 2016. © USA Today.
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.
Le statisticien américain Patrick Ball, expert au procès de Hissène Habré, a déclaré vendredi que le taux de mortalité d’opposants tchadiens présumés dans les prisons du régime Habré était encore pire que celui des prisonniers de guerre américains dans les camps japonais.
Por ello, Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), el Programa de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) y Data Cívica, realizan un análisis estadístico construido a partir de una variable en la que se identifican fosas clandestinas a partir de búsquedas automatizadas en medios locales y nacionales, y usando datos geográficos y sociodemográficos.
The Washington Post’s Paul Schemm recognized HRDAG’s work in Syria, in the category of research and activism. “HRDAG gained renown at the start of the war, when it was one of the few organizations that tried to put a number on the war’s enormous toll in Syrian lives.”
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 ...
As we get ready to begin our fourth year as an independent nonprofit, we are, as always, indebted to our Advisory Board and to our funders for their support and vision. We’re finishing up a busy year that took us to Dakar (for the trial of former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré), Pristina (for the release of the Kosovo Memory Book), Colombia (for work on a book about the Guatemalan Police Archives), and kept us busy here at home working on police violence statistics. But one of our biggest victories has been to score a new, talented, wise Advisory Board member—Michael Bear Kleinman, whom we first met when he was working with Humanity United.
...
In a CNN interview predicting a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Henrik Urdal from PRIO talks about his shortlist and HRDAG.
Earlier this month, HRDAG and the Historic Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala launched a book that represents a long-time collaboration between the two organizations. The book, “Una mirada al AHPN a partir de un studio de cuantitativo,” is, as the title states, a look at the Archive’s datasets via a quantitative study. Book authors are HRDAG executive director Megan Price and AHPN colleague Carolina López, with translations by Beatriz Vejarano. The book is available in Spanish and forthcoming in English.
The book explains how HRDAG and the Archive worked together over a decade to gain insight into the police activities that ...
Today Guatemala’s former national police chief Colonel Héctor Rafael Bol de la Cruz was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the 1984 kidnapping and disappearance of 27-year-old student union leader Fernando Garcia, who was last seen when officers detained him outside his home. Along with Bol de la Cruz, former senior police officer Jorge Gomez was also tried; he received a sentence of 40 years in prison. That verdict comes in part because of testimony this month by HRDAG’s Patrick Ball, who served as an expert witness and presented data analysis done with colleague Daniel Guzmán to assess the flow of thousands of ...
In December 2006, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report documenting torture and unlawful killings committed by Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite anti-crime and anti-terrorism force. According to HRW, many of the deaths for which RAB is responsible resulted from summary executions or extreme physical abuse. The statistical analysis presented in the report, "Judge, Jury, and Death: Torture and Executions by Bangladesh's Elite Security Force," was conducted by Romesh Silva, a statistician who worked within the Benetech Human Rights Program at the time, and who now works with HRDAG.
While researching these incidents, HRW compiled ...
