In the last three days of the Sri Lankan civil war, as thousands of people surrendered to government authorities, hundreds of people were put on buses driven by Army officers. Many were never seen again.

In a report released today (see here), the International Truth and Justice Project for Sri Lanka and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group showed that over 500 people were disappeared on only three days — 17, 18, and 19 May.

HRDAG analyst William Isaac is quoted in this article about so-called crime prediction. “They’re not predicting the future. What they’re actually predicting is where the next recorded police observations are going to occur.”

In this post, Cory Doctorow writes about the Significance article co-authored by Kristian Lum and William Isaac.

On the heels of the Women in Data Science conference, HRDAG executive director Megan Price says, “I think creativity and communication are probably the two most important skills for a data scientist to have these days.”

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.

“Every kind of classification system – human or machine – has several kinds of errors it might make,” [Patrick Ball] says. “To frame that in a machine learning context, what kind of error do we want the machine to make?” HRDAG’s work on predictive policing shows that “predictive policing” finds patterns in police records, not patterns in occurrence of crime.

“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.

As executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, Megan Price uses statistics to shine the light on human rights abuses.

Kristian Lum, lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (and letter signatory), fears that “in order to flag even a small proportion of future terrorists, this tool will likely flag a huge number of people who would never go on to be terrorists,” and that “these ‘false positives’ will be real people who would never have gone on to commit criminal acts but will suffer the consequences of being flagged just the same.”

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes about HRDAG director of research Patrick Ball’s article “Violence in Blue,” published March 4 in Granta. From the post: “In a must-read article in Granta, Ball explains the fundamentals of statistical estimation, and then applies these techniques to US police killings, merging data-sets from the police and the press to arrive at an estimate of the knowable US police homicides (about 1,250/year) and the true total (about 1,500/year). That means that of all the killings by strangers in the USA, one third are committed by the police.”

Researchers from Rice University and Duke University are using the tools of statistics and data science in collaboration with Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) to accurately and efficiently estimate the number of identified victims killed in the Syrian civil war.

…

Using records from four databases of people killed in the Syrian war, Chen, Duke statistician and machine learning expert Rebecca Steorts and Rice computer scientist Anshumali Shrivastava estimated there were 191,874 unique individuals documented from March 2011 to April 2014. That’s very close to the estimate of 191,369 compiled in 2014 by HRDAG, a nonprofit that helps build scientifically defensible, evidence-based arguments of human rights violations.

“Kristian Lum… organized a workshop together with Elizabeth Bender, a staff attorney for the NY Legal Aid Society and former public defender, and Terrence Wilkerson, an innocent man who had been arrested and could not afford bail. Together, they shared first hand experience about the obstacles and inefficiencies that occur in the legal system, providing valuable context to the debate around COMPAS.”

“I was always a math nerd. My mother has a polaroid of me in the fourth grade with my science fair project … . It was the history of mathematics. In college, I was a math major for a year and then switched to statistics.

I always wanted to work in social justice. I was raised by hippies, went to protests when I was young. I always felt I had an obligation to make the world a little bit better.”

“Data, by itself, isn’t truth.” How HRDAG uses data analysis and statistical methods to shed light on mass human rights abuses. Executive director Patrick Ball is quoted from his speech at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany.