216 results for search: %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BD bit.ly%2Fpsy3000


Beautiful game, ugly truth?

Megan Price (2022). Beautiful game, ugly truth? Significance, 19: 18-21. December 2022. © The Royal Statistical Society. https://doi.org/10.1111/1740-9713.01702

Megan Price (2022). Beautiful game, ugly truth? Significance, 19: 18-21. December 2022. © The Royal Statistical Society. https://doi.org/10.1111/1740-9713.01702


The Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s Overestimation of Utility and Risk

Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s Overestimation of Utility and Risk. Logic(s). 13 December, 2023. Issue 20.

Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s Overestimation of Utility and Risk. Logic(s). 13 December, 2023. Issue 20.


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.


Press Release, Timor-Leste, February 2006

SILICON VALLEY GROUP USES TECHNOLOGY TO HELP THE TRUTH COMMISSION ANSWER DISPUTED QUESTIONS ABOUT MASSIVE POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN TIMOR-LESTE Palo Alto, CA, February 9, 2006 – The Benetech® Initiative today released a statistical report detailing widespread and systematic 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) Timorese were killed or disappeared, while the remainder died due to hunger and illness in excess of what would be expected due to peacetime mortality. The magnitude of deaths ...

12 Questions about Using Data Analysis to Bring Guatemalan War Criminals to Justice

When people talk about war criminals in Guatemala, which war are they talking about? They’re talking about the Guatemalan civil war, which began in 1960 and ended in 1996. That’s thirty-six years of civil war. Even though it ended almost two decades ago, Guatemala is still recovering from it. At its simplest, this civil war story was right-wing government forces fighting leftist rebels. But it went deeper than that, of course. The majority of the rebel forces was composed of indigenous peoples, primarily the Maya, (more…)

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  

HRDAG Retreat 2022

A week in the California redwoods amongst a hodgepodge of people united by their passion for using quantitative analysis to combat injustice.

HRDAG Testimony in Guatemala Retrials

HRDAG analysis presented by Patrick found that 5 percent of the indigenous Maya Ixil population was killed in a 15-month period.

How to Become a Data Scientist: My Lessons at HRDAG

I will use the skills and culture I learned from HRDAG’s team to understand how the conflict has affected the people in my country.

String matching for governorate information in unstructured text

code{white-space: pre;} pre:not([class]) { background-color: white; } h1 { font-size: 34px; } h1.title { font-size: 38px; } h2 { font-size: 30px; } h3 { font-size: 24px; } h4 { font-size: 18px; } h5 { font-size: 16px; } h6 { font-size: 12px; } .table th:not([align]) { text-align: left; } .main-container { max-width: 940px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } code { color: inherit; background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.04); } img { max-width:100%; height: auto; } .tabbed-pane { padding-top: 12px; } .html-widget { margin-bottom: 20px; } button.code-foldin...

Timor-Leste Op-Ed

Defending Human Rights Data And The Possibility of Justice In East Timor By Patrick Ball and Romesh Silva On June 5th, armed gangs broke into the offices of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in Dili, East Timor and stole their motorbikes. Many human rights workers wondered whether the mobs would soon return to loot the irreplaceable paper records used by the CAVR to compile a definitive report on human rights abuses during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975-1999. The release of this report was preempted by the recent violence in Dili. But in the midst of the chaos, Australian military forces stepped in to ...

Chad – Photo Essay

[français] Hissène Habré was president of the former French colony of Chad from 1982 to 1990. Credible allegations of systematic torture and crimes against humanity have been made against Habré’s state security force, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS), which pursued political opponents and operated notorious prisons during his regime. One prison where the DDS is alleged to have tortured prisoners is the “Piscine,” a former swimming pool covered by a concrete roof. Prisoners were held in ten dank cells where witnesses say they were starved and abused. After being forced from power in 1990, Habré went into exile ...

FAQs on Predictive Policing and Bias

Last month Significance magazine published an article on the topic of predictive policing and police bias, which I co-authored with William Isaac. Since then, we've published a blogpost about it and fielded a few recurring questions. Here they are, along with our responses. Do your findings still apply given that PredPol uses crime reports rather than arrests as training data? Because this article was meant for an audience that is not necessarily well-versed in criminal justice data and we were under a strict word limit, we simplified language in describing the data. The data we used is a version of the Oakland Police Department’s crime report...

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 ...

Colombia Report

Benetech Human Rights Program and Corporación Punto de Vista Issues Report on Sexual Violence in Colombia Researchers Find that Data About Sexual Violence is Difficult To Collect and Subject to Misinterpretation May 2, 2011, Palo Alto, CA — The Benetech Human Rights Program has issued a report with the Colombian NGO Corporación Punto de Vista which examines how quantitative data can be used to assess conflict related sexual violence in Colombia. Written by Francoise Roth, Tamy Guberek and Amelia Hoover Green, Using Quantitative Data to Assess Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Colombia: Challenges and Opportunities notes that sexual violations ...

PredPol amplifies racially biased policing

100x100-micHRDAG associate William Isaac is quoted in this article about how predictive policing algorithms such as PredPol exacerbate the problem of racial bias in policing.


New UN report counts 191,369 Syrian-war deaths — but the truth is probably much, much worse

Amanda Taub of Vox has interviewed HRDAG executive director about the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Right’s release of HRDAG’s third report on reported killings in the Syrian conflict.
From the article:
Patrick Ball, Executive Director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and one of the report’s authors, explained to me that this new report is not a statistical estimate of the number of people killed in the conflict so far. Rather, it’s an actual list of specific victims who have been identified by name, date, and location of death. (The report only tracked violent killings, not “excess mortality” deaths from from disease or hunger that the conflict is causing indirectly.)


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) ...

Why Collecting Data In Conflict Zones Is Invaluable—And Nearly Impossible


60,000 Dead in Syria? Why the Death Toll is Likely Even Higher


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.

Donate