Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes about HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and his contribution to Carl Bialik’s article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported, in 538 Politics.
HRDAG associate William Isaac is quoted in this article about how predictive policing algorithms such as PredPol exacerbate the problem of racial bias in policing.
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.”
This is the fourth ALGO story.
Kristian Lum discusses the challenges of getting accurate data from conflict zones, as well as her concerns about predictive policing if law enforcement gets it wrong.
Patrick Ball, un expert en statistiques engagé par les Chambres africaines extraordinaires, a conclu que la « mortalité dans les prisons de la DDS fut substantiellement plus élevée que celles des pires contextes du XXe siècle de prisonniers de guerre ».
Text in English
Para evaluar afirmaciones sobre la reducción de la violencia letal en Colombia
En marzo de 2007, el Grupo de Análisis de Datos de Derechos Humanos (HRDAG por sus siglas en inglés) publicó un estudio con el título de "Para Evaluar Afirmaciones Sobre la Reducción de la Violencia Letal en Colombia." Los autores de dicho estudio evaluaron aseveraciones que la violencia en Colombia disminuyó tras la desmovilización de los paramilitares. Demostraron que tales afirmaciones se basan tanto en una sobreinterpretación de datos no ajustados como en inferencias causales infundadas. Los autores concluyeron que se requieren múltip...
Anita Gohdes and Megan Price (2013). Journal of Conflict Resolution, Volume 57 Issue 6 December 2013. © 2013 Journal of Conflict Resolution. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of SAGE. [online abstract]DOI: 10.1177/0022002712459708.
Members of the Salvadoran military committed tens of thousands of killings during the country’s civil war which raged from the late 1970’s until 1990. While working for a peace organization in El Salvador in 1991, Patrick Ball was asked by a colleague at a human rights group to help organize a large collection of human rights testimonies. Trained as a social scientist, Ball created the “Who Did What To Whom” (WTWTW) model for examining human rights data. Ball used this system to create a structured, relational database of violations reported in more than 9,000 testimonies to the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission.
To determine who was most ...
I look at the beach and then at the table surrounded by nerds, deep in thought and conversation about Dirichlet priors, matching algorithms, and armed conflicts. This peculiar (in the best way) environment catalyzes a moment of reflection: how did I get here?
Four years ago, as a second-year statistics PhD student, I watched "Guatemala: The Secret Files" on PBS Frontline World. I listened to stories of family members who disappeared without answers or justice. Then the story shifted to the work being done by archivists and data experts at Guatemala's Historic Archive of the National Police. The scientists' pursuit of the truth energized me. I ...
The online version of the 2019 Year-End Review will appear in January 2020.
In 2018, HRDAG collaborated on work in Guatemala, US criminal justice, and more.
We are saddened by the passing of Steve Fienberg yesterday in Pittsburgh, at the age of 74. He is perhaps best known around the world for bringing statistics to science and public policy and was a beloved professor at Carnegie Mellon University. At HRDAG we are in awe of and grateful for the work Steve did formalizing multiple systems estimation. His work on that front blazed a trail and essentially enabled all of our most important analytical work at the intersection of human rights and statistical science.
If we are to reduce the amount of human violence in the world, the first task is to determine the scope of the violence, to know how much of ...
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes about HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and his contribution to Carl Bialik's article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported, in 538 Politics. Doctorow writes:
Patrick Ball and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group applied the same statistical rigor that he uses in estimating the scale of atrocities and genocides for Truth and Reconciliation panels in countries like Syria and Guatemala to the problem of estimating killing by US cops, and came up with horrific conclusions.
Ball was responding to a set of new estima...
How we built a model to search hundreds of thousands of text messages from the perpetrators of a human rights crime.
We are pleased to announce that HRDAG will be supported by two additions to our Advisory Board, Julie Broome and Frank Schulenburg.
We’ve worked with Julie for many years, getting to know her when she was Director of Programmes at The Sigrid Rausing Trust. She is now the Director of London-based Ariadne, a network of European funders and philanthropists. She worked at the Trust for seven years, most notably Head of Human Rights, before becoming Director of Programmes in 2014. Before joining the Trust she was Programme Director at the CEELI Institute in Prague, where she was responsible for conducting rule of law-related trainings for judges and ...
HRDAG has published a report about the 500 Tamils who disappeared while in Army custody in Sri Lanka in 2009.