Alanna Flores joins HRDAG for the summer as a Data Science Fellow.
Megan Price, director of research, is quoted in this story about the R programming language. "Serious data analysis is not something you're going to do using a mouse and drop-down boxes," said HRDAG's director of research Megan Price. "It's the kind of thing you're going to do getting close to the data, getting close to the code and writing some of it yourself."
TechTarget blog
Ed Burns
March 19, 2014
Link to story in TechTarget
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How we built a model to search hundreds of thousands of text messages from the perpetrators of a human rights crime.
Text in English
Assessing Claims of Declining Lethal Violence
In March 2007, HRDAG published a study entitled "Assessing Claims of Declining Lethal Violence in Colombia." The authors of this report evaluated assertions that violence in Colombia declined after the demobilization of paramilitaries. They showed that these claims rest both on the overinterpretation of unadjusted data and on unsound causal inferences. The authors concluded that multiple data sources are needed to estimate the true rates of violence in Colombia after demobilization and they suggest avenues for further research.
This research paper is also available in Spanish at ...
“Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s Director of Research and the statistician behind the code, explained that the Random Forest classifier was able to predict with 100% accuracy which counties that would go on to have mass graves found in them in 2014 by using the model against data from 2013. The model also predicted the counties that did not have mass hidden graves found in them, but that show a high likelihood of the possibility. This prediction aspect of the model is the part that holds the most potential for future research.”
The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.
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Using multiple system estimation, we estimate the total population of social movement leaders killed in Colombia during 2018.
Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, and Tarak Shah (2024). “Innocence Discovery Lab - Harnessing Large Language Models to Surface Data Buried in Wrongful Conviction Case Documents." The Wrongful Conviction Law Review 5 (1):103-25. https://doi.org/10.29173/wclawr112. 31 May, 2024. Copyright (c) 2024 Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, Tarak Shah. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, and Tarak Shah (2024). “Innocence Discovery Lab – Harnessing Large Language Models to Surface Data Buried in Wrongful Conviction Case Documents.” The Wrongful Conviction Law Review 5 (1):103-25. https://doi.org/10.29173/wclawr112. 31 May, 2024. Copyright (c) 2024 Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, Tarak Shah. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Your tax deductible gift helps us seek justice for victims of human rights violations, hold perpetrators accountable, and strengthen the overall human rights advocacy community.
HRDAG is a project of Community Partners, providing us with administrative infrastructure — so we can focus on our mission and work. We are grateful for your (and their) support.
Patrick Ball and Frances Harrison (2018). How many people disappeared on 17–19 May 2009 in Sri Lanka? Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 12 December 2018.© 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
Patrick Ball and Frances Harrison (2018). How many people disappeared on 17–19 May 2009 in Sri Lanka? Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 12 December 2018.© 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
The interview poses questions about Lum's focus on artificial intelligence and its impact on predictive policing and sentencing programs.
Dave Neary described “5 Humanitarian FOSS Projects to Watch,” listing HRDAG’s work on police homicides in the U.S. and other human rights abuses in other countries.
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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.
The HRDAG Tech Corner is where we collect the deeper and geekier content that we create for the website. You can browse by Category or scroll to view find all articles listed.
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.
HRDAG contributed to work by the ACLU showing that a predictive tool used to guide responses to alleged child neglect may forever flag parents with disabilities. “These predictors have the effect of casting permanent suspicion and offer no means of recourse for families marked by these indicators,” according to the analysis from researchers at the ACLU and the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group. “They are forever seen as riskier to their children.”
In 2018, HRDAG collaborated on work in Guatemala, US criminal justice, and more.
