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The case of Ana Lucrecia Orellana Stormont
When working with documents in an archive, every document offers the opportunity for statistical study and quantitative research. But a document can also offer the discovery of a story. That is the case with the disappearance of Ana Lucrecia Orellana Stormont, who was reported missing on June 6, 1983, at the age of 35.
Ana Lucrecia, a professor of psychology at the University of San Carlos, was scheduled to attend a meeting with Edgar Raúl Rivas Rodríguez at the Plaza Hotel in Guatemala’s capital city. Edgar, who also went missing, was a teacher at the School of Political Science at the University. (Ana Lucrecia’s case is explained more fully ...
How Many People Will Get Covid-19?
HRDAG has authored two articles in Significance that add depth to discussions around infection rates.
Where Stats and Rights Thrive Together
Everyone I had the pleasure of interacting with enriched my summer in some way.
New results for the identification of municipalities with clandestine graves in Mexico
The goal of this project is identify Mexican municipalities with a high probability of having clandestine graves. Knowing where to search will help to create better public programs regarding missing persons in Mexico.
HRDAG and #GivingTuesday 2017
Help us hold human rights violators accountable!
Reflections: Pivotal Moments in Freetown
The summer of 2002 in Washington, DC, was steamy and hot, which is how I remember my introduction to HRDAG. I had begun working with them, while they were still at AAAS, in the late spring, learning all about their core concepts: duplicate reporting and MSE, controlled vocabularies, inter-rater reliability, data models and more. The days were long, with a second shift more often than not running late into the evening. In addition to all the learning, I also helped with matching for the Chad project – that is, identifying multiple records of the same violation – back when matching was done by hand. But it was not long after I arrived in Washington ...
Accountability at home and abroad
Dear friends,
Our spirits were really on the ground on Wednesday, but they lifted at the board meeting we had at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group on Thursday. Executive Director Megan Price, Director of Research Patrick Ball, and the Board drafted these thoughts which we'd like to share with you.
For more than twenty-five years, we have held heads of state accountable for human rights violations. We support our partners and advocates in the human rights field. They collect data which we analyze using technical and scientific expertise. Those scientific results bring clarity to human rights violence and support the fight for justice.
...
Reflections: Richard Savage’s Vision Fulfilled
In 1984, as a fresh PhD, I heard Richard Savage give his presidential address at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Philadelphia. He called it "Hard/Soft Problems" and made a big pitch for statisticians to get involved in human rights data analysis. It was inspirational, and I was immediately sold. I started working with the American Statistical Association's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (now chaired by HRDAG's own Megan Price). Over time, a growing set of statisticians became involved, initially in letter-writing campaigns to help dissident statisticians (and other quantitative academics—economists seemed to have a particular ...
Our Story
Dec 10, 1991
HRDAG is born when Patrick Ball begins database design at the Human Rights Office of the Salvadoran Lutheran Church. The work soon moves to the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (CDHES). The database analysis identified the 100 worst officers in the Salvadoran military — who were forced to resign as part of the peace process.
1994
Patrick publishes A Definit...
A better statistical estimation of known Syrian war victims
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.
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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.
Judges in Habré Trial Cite HRDAG Analysis
Three months after the announcement of the momentous verdict finding former Chadian president Hissène Habré guilty of crimes against humanity, the presiding judges have released the full, written 681-page judgment of the court. Testimony given by HRDAG’s director of research, Patrick Ball, is mentioned at three points in the verdict.
The judges included in their written judgment the HRDAG analysis that the mortality rate in Habré prisons was staggeringly high—much higher than the mortality rate among the population as a whole. Here’s an excerpt from the judgment, page 358 (translated by Google):
The statistical expert, Patrick Ball, ...
HRDAG and Amnesty International: Prison Mortality in Syria
Today Amnesty International released “‘It breaks the human’: Torture, disease and death in Syria’s prisons ,” a report detailing the conditions and mortality in Syrian prisons from 2011 to 2015, including data analysis conducted by HRDAG.
The report provides harrowing accounts of ill treatment of detainees in Syrian prisons since the conflict erupted in March 2011, and publishes HRDAG’s estimate of the number of killings that occurred inside the prisons.
To accompany the report, HRDAG has released a technical memo that explains the methodology, sources, and implications of the findings. The HRDAG team used data from four ...
HRDAG and AHPN Launch Book Detailing Collaboration
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 ...
New publication in BIOMETRIKA
New paper in Biometrika, co-authored by HRDAG's Kristian Lum and James Johndrow: Theoretical limits of microclustering in record linkage.
Partners
How we work with partners is how we relate to the whole human rights community. We work with human rights advocates and defenders to support their goals by complementing their substantive expertise with our technical expertise. To date, partners have included truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, United Nations missions, and non-governmental human rights organizations on five continents.
Here are a few stories that illustrate how we work with our partners:
HRDAG partner stories:
Quantifying Police Misconduct in Louisiana (2023)
Scraping for Pattern: Protecting Immigrant Rights in Washington State (2022)
Police Violence ...
Data ‘hashing’ improves estimate of the number of victims in databases
But while HRDAG’s estimate relied on the painstaking efforts of human workers to carefully weed out potential duplicate records, hashing with statistical estimation proved to be faster, easier and less expensive. The researchers said hashing also had the important advantage of a sharp confidence interval: The range of error is plus or minus 1,772, or less than 1 percent of the total number of victims.
“The big win from this method is that we can quickly calculate the probable number of unique elements in a dataset with many duplicates,” said Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s director of research. “We can do a lot with this estimate.”
Violence in Blue: The 2020 Update
HRDAG has refreshed a 2016 Granta article about homicides committed by police in the United States.
PRIO Director Henrik Urdal’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize Shortlist
Henrik Urdal has released his final Nobel Shortlist for 2022, and HRDAG is included on it, alongside Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Alexei Navalny, and others. The list highlights pro-democracy efforts, multilateral cooperation, combating religious extremism and intolerance, and the value that research and knowledge can have for promoting peace.
Announcing New HRDAG Advisory Board Member
Elizabeth Eagen of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University will expand the HRDAG advisory board.