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The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool

Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. ACLU. Summer 2023.

Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. ACLU. Summer 2023.


HRDAG’s Year End Review: 2018

In 2018, HRDAG collaborated on work in Guatemala, US criminal justice, and more.

Killings of Social Movement Leaders in Colombia

Using multiple system estimation, we estimate the total population of social movement leaders killed in Colombia during 2018.

Sri Lanka

Ten years after the war ended in Sri Lanka, we still don’t know to the nearest ten thousand how many people perished. The estimates for the death toll for the last five months of the war alone vary between 7000 and 147,000. In 2011, the UN said it thought approximately 40,000 civilians had died; then in 2012 an internal UN report estimated it was at least 70,000. Population data from World Bank and UN sources indicated that more than 100,000 Tamils living in the conflict areas in the north have not returned home after the war. HRDAG has provided technical assistance to a broad range of non-governmental human rights organizations in Sri ...

Counting The Dead: How Statistics Can Find Unreported Killings

Ball analyzed the data reporters had collected from a variety of sources – including on-the-ground interviews, police records, and human rights groups – and used a statistical technique called multiple systems estimation to roughly calculate the number of unreported deaths in three areas of the capital city Manila.

The team discovered that the number of drug-related killings was much higher than police had reported. The journalists, who published their findings last month in The Atlantic, documented 2,320 drug-linked killings over an 18-month period, approximately 1,400 more than the official number. Ball’s statistical analysis, which estimated the number of killings the reporters hadn’t heard about, found that close to 3,000 people could have been killed – more than three times the police figure.

Ball said there are both moral and technical reasons for making sure everyone who has been killed in mass violence is counted.

“The moral reason is because everyone who has been murdered should be remembered,” he said. “A terrible thing happened to them and we have an obligation as a society to justice and to dignity to remember them.”


Tech Corner

The HRDAG Tech Corner is where we collect the deeper and geekier content that we create for the website. Click the accordion blocks below to reveal each of the Tech Corner entries. Sifting Massive Datasets with Machine Learning Principled Data Processing  

In Pursuit of Excellent Data Processing

With help from HRDAG, Roman Rivera built the data backbone for the Invisible Institute's Citizens Police Data Project.

Multiple Systems Estimation: Stratification and Estimation

<< Previous post, MSE: The Matching Process Q10. What is stratification? Q11. [In depth] How do HRDAG analysts approach stratification, and why is it important? Q12. How does MSE find the total number of violations? Q13. [In depth] What are the assumptions of two-system MSE (capture-recapture)? Why are they not necessary with three or more systems? Q14. What statistical model(s) does HRDAG typically use to calculate MSE estimates? (more…)

Megan Price Elected Board Member of Tor Project

Today The Tor Project announced that it has elected a new Board of Directors, and among them is HRDAG executive director Megan Price. The Tor Project is a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes online privacy and provides software that helps users opt out of online tracking. Megan and Patrick have long maintained that encryption and privacy are essential for enabling human rights work. Patrick's ideas are described in Monday's FedScoop story about encryption, human rights, and the U.S. State Department. “Human rights groups depend on strong cryptography in order to hold governments accountable," says Patrick. "HRDAG depends on local human ...

Beka Steorts Named MIT Under-35 Innovator

We’ve known for years that Beka Steorts is on the cutting-edge of statistical science, and now The MIT Technology Review has realized the same. Last week she was named one of 35 Innovators Under 35, in the category of humanitarian. We first became familiar with Beka's work in 2013 when she was a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon and was introduced to us by Prof. Steve Fienberg. Since then, we’ve felt very fortunate to collaborate with her on projects such as the UN enumeration of casualties in the Syrian conflict, and we look forward to many more years of work with her. She is one of several young stars we include in our superheroine hall ...

Using MSE to Estimate Unobserved Events

At HRDAG, we worry about what we don't know. Specifically, we worry about how we can use statistical techniques to estimate homicides that are not observed by human rights groups. Based on what we've seen studying many conflicts over the last 25 years, what we don't know is often quite different from what we do know. The technique we use most often to estimate what we don't know is called "multiple systems estimation." In this medium-technical post, I explain how to organize data and use three R packages to estimate unobserved events. Click here for Computing Multiple Systems Estimation in R.

Epidemiology has theories. We should study them.

With so many dashboards and shiny visualizations, how can an interested non-technical reader find good science among the noise?

How Predictive Policing Reinforces Bias

Algorithmic tools like PredPol were supposed to reduce bias. But HRDAG has found that racial bias is baked into the data used to train the tools.

La estadística de mortalidad del conflicto en Perú

En ese artículo respondemos a una crítica del estudio de mortalidad que realizamos para la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación en 2003.

Machine learning is being used to uncover the mass graves of Mexico’s missing

“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.”


Press Release, Timor-Leste, November 2006

Palo Alto, CA, November 12, 2006 –The Benetech® Initiative congratulates the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) and the Timorese people for the official release of the CAVR's final report Chega! in Australia today. The 2,500 page report uncovers previously unknown findings about past human rights abuses in Timor-Leste between 1974 and 1999. In particular, the report uncovers widespread and systematic human rights violations in Timor-Leste during the period 1974-1999. Benetech's statistical analysis establishes that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of the conflict. Approximately 18,600 (+/- 1000) ...

HRDAG To Join the Partnership on AI

HRDAG is joining Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (PAI).

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…)

Layers of Bias: A Unified Approach for Understanding Problems With Risk Assessment

Laurel Eckhouse, Kristian Lum, Cynthia Conti-Cook and Julie Ciccolini (2018). Layers of Bias: A Unified Approach for Understanding Problems With Risk Assessment. Criminal Justice and Behavior. November 23, 2018. © 2018 Sage Journals. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854818811379

Laurel Eckhouse, Kristian Lum, Cynthia Conti-Cook and Julie Ciccolini (2018). Layers of Bias: A Unified Approach for Understanding Problems With Risk Assessment. Criminal Justice and Behavior. November 23, 2018. © 2018 Sage Journals. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854818811379


Remembering Scott Weikart

HRDAG’s core values all have a connection to Scott Weikart, 1951–2023.

Our work has been used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations. We have worked with partners on projects on five continents.

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