473 results for search: Aseguradoras de coches Big Spring TX llama ahora al 888-430-8975 Comprar seguro de auto Instituciones aseguradoras Seguros todo riesgo para vehiculos Calcular el seguro de coche mas barato Cotizar seguro en linea Precios de seguros de vehiculos
Sierra Leone
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 ...
A geeky deep-dive: database deduplication to identify victims of human rights violations
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 ...
Counting the Dead in Sri Lanka
ITJP and HRDAG are urging groups inside and outside Sri Lanka to share existing casualty lists.
Updated Casualty Count for Syria
Today the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released an HRDAG-prepared report that describes and tallies documented killings in the Syrian Arab Republic from the beginning of the conflict in March 2011 through April 2014. (The report is here.) This is our third report for the UN on the Syrian conflict, and it is an update of work we published in January 2013 and June 2013.
The report, Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic, concludes that approximately 191,000 identifiable victims have been reported in the period covered (March 2011 – April 2014). (more…)
Evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book at Pristina
On February 4, 2015, at the National Archive in Pristina, Kosovo, HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball gave a presentation on research (done with colleague Jule Krüger) about the database of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB). The KMB is part of the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade and Pristina). In this photo, Patrick is speaking, and HLC-Belgrade executive director emeritus Natasa Kandic and Professor Michael Spagat are at the table with him. At the laptop between Spagat and Patrick is Laza Lazarevic of HLC; he is part of the KMB team.
About 130 people attended—a terrific response.
Presentation on the research behind the Evaluation of the ...
Experts Greet Kosovo Memory Book
On Wednesday, February 4, in Pristina, international experts praised the Humanitarian Law Centre's database on victims of the Kosovo conflict, the Kosovo Memory Book. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted in the article that appeared in Balkan Transitional Justice.
HLC’s work won praise from Patrick Ball, from Human Rights Data Analysis Group and from Michael Spagat, professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who have examined and analysed the database.
Ball, with 24 years of experience in databases and statistics of human rights, said that the HLC’s database had enormous quality and marked it out as among the ...
An Award for Anita Gohdes
On November 26, HRDAG colleague Anita Gohdes was awarded the German Dissertation Prize for the Social Sciences. The patron of the prize is the President of the German Parliament, Norbert Lammert, who presented Anita with the award.
Anita’s dissertation, “Repression 2.0: The Internet in the War Arsenal of Modern Dictators,” investigates the role played by social media networks in modern dictatorships, such as President Assad’s regime in Syria. On one hand, Anita argues, social media can help opposition groups to organize more effectively, but on the other hand, the same networks allow regimes to monitor and manipulate the population. ...
.Rproj Considered Harmful
We aim to produce code that is clear, replicatable across machines and operating systems, and that leaves an easy-to-follow audit trail.
Reflections: Minding the Gap
How might we learn what we don’t know? HRDAG associate Christine Grillo hits the wayback machine and recalls her first exposure to People Against Bad Things, ideas about bias and correlation versus causation, and truth.
Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses
“If you’re not careful, you risk automating the exact same biases these programs are supposed to eliminate,” says Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the San Francisco-based, non-profit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). Last year, Lum and a co-author showed that PredPol, a program for police departments that predicts hotspots where future crime might occur, could potentially get stuck in a feedback loop of over-policing majority black and brown neighbourhoods. The program was “learning” from previous crime reports. For Samuel Sinyangwe, a justice activist and policy researcher, this kind of approach is “especially nefarious” because police can say: “We’re not being biased, we’re just doing what the math tells us.” And the public perception might be that the algorithms are impartial.
Disrupt San Francisco TechCrunch 2018
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.
How Data Processing Uncovers Misconduct in Use of Force in Puerto Rico
In Puerto Rico, some people are more likely to be victims of police violence than others. HRDAG processed a flood of data to illuminate the racial bias.
Contact Us
You may contact us via info @ hrdag.org or use this form.
Would you like to receive our newsletter?
Great! Please sign up here.
Find us on Mastodon
Follow HRDAG on Mastodon.
Employment with HRDAG
Please keep in touch by signing up for our newsletters and following us on Twitter @hrdag or Mastodon.
If you do not see a job listed here, please do not send your CV or résumé, as we do not file or save them, and we will only have to send you a sad “no thank you” letter.
Volunteering with HRDAG
Are you interested in volunteering your time to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group? We’re very flattered—but at this time we’re ...
The Day We Fight Back
Today, February 11, is the day of national protests against the National Security Administration.
The critical threat is mass surveillance. In the words of The Day We Fight Back, “Together we will push back against powers that seek to observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action. Together, we will make it clear that such behavior is not compatible with democratic governance. Together, if we persist, we will win this fight.” (more…)
Changes at HRDAG
A special announcement from the HRDAG Advisory Board:
Beginning officially on December 1, HRDAG is changing leadership. After nearly three years as Executive Director, Patrick Ball will become the new Director of Research. Megan Price will be the new Executive Director.
Patrick has spent more than 25 years working at the intersection of human rights and statistical science. Over that time, he has finely honed statistical methodology for quantifying mass killings. Now he is excited about the chance to go deeper into research for HRDAG and develop additional approaches for new problems. In his new role, Patrick will focus more on technical coding ...
Perú
In 2001, President Alejandro Toledo, called for the establishment of the Comision de la Verdad y Reconciliacion (CVR) (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) to investigate human rights abuses in Perú between 1980 and 2000. Dr. Patrick Ball was invited to work with the Commission to evaluate the CVR technical work and make recommendations on the information management process and analytic strategies. HRDAG consultant Jana Asher worked with Dr. Ball and CVR staff members David Sulmont (Director Informations Systems) and Daniel Manrique (Database Expert) to present evidence of the violations in a report to the CVR.
The work included new estimates of ...
Celebrating our First Anniversary and Welcoming Our Newest Board Member
One year ago, HRDAG cast out on its own as an independent nonprofit—and this first year has been busy, productive, and exciting. We’re indebted to our Advisory Board for their valuable contributions and to our funders for their generosity and participation in our mission. Highlights of the past year include contributing testimony to three court cases, publishing two reports on conflict-casualties in Syria, presenting over a dozen talks (many of which are available on our talks page), traveling to over half a dozen countries to testify, collaborate with partners, and participate in conferences/workshops, hiring a new technical lead, and bringing in ...
El Salvador
Some of the earliest large-scale human rights information projects happened in El Salvador. One was developed by Patrick Ball at the Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission, also known as Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES-ng). Between 1977 and 1990, more than 9,000 testimonies were taken in an effort to document the nature and scope of the bloody conflict between the army and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Starting in 1991, Patrick worked with CDHES staff to organize the information in an early computer database. They linked reported human rights violations with the career structures of individual ...
How a Data Tool Tracks Police Misconduct and Wandering Officers
Some police officers avoid accountability by “wandering” to another agency. HRDAG and partners created a data tool that tracks officers’ employment history.
Our Copyright Policy
We have specified "Some Rights Reserved" on our website, instead of the more conventional "All Rights Reserved." This is because some of our web content is covered by a Creative Commons license, which means that it may be copied and even re-purposed, with some stipulations. We have made this decision because HRDAG wants to contribute to the digital commons, defined by Creative Commons as "a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law."
Our Creative Commons License
We are using the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, also known as the BY-NC-SA license. Here is ...