Elizabeth Eagen of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University will expand the HRDAG advisory board.
Alanna Flores joins HRDAG for the summer as a Data Science Fellow.
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.
HRDAG
A key question of interest for the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic is how many victims of the ongoing conflict were killed while in custody? Through our long collaboration with both the UN and multiple Syrian documentation groups, our team of data scientists at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) have access to documented records of victims killed, under a variety of circumstances, in the Syrian Arab Republic between 2011 and 2023. This report is based on records collected by eight sources documenting deaths in the ongoing armed conflict in Syria.
Creative Commons International license 4.0.
Maria Gargiulo, Tarak Shah, Megan Price (2024). Deaths in Custody during the Armed Conflict in Syria, 2011–2023. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 10 December, 2024. © 2024 HRDAG.Â
“Led by the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), the process began with creating a merged dataset of “fully identified victims” to avoid double counting. Only casualties whose complete details were listed — such as their full name, date of death and the governorate they had been killed in — were included on this initial list, explained Megan Price, executive director at HRDAG. If details were missing, the victim could not be confidently cross-checked across the eight organizations’ lists, and so was excluded. This provided HRDAG and the U.N. with a minimum count of individuals whose deaths were fully documented by at least one of the different organizations. … “
Cynthia Conti-Cook came on board in March, 2025.
Our newest Data Science Fellow, Will Taylor, is currently a doctoral student in political science and public policy at the University of Michigan.
A monthly newsletter exploring how math and science help us understand the world.
Hi, I’m Patrick Ball. I’m a statistician, which is a type of scientist that uses mathematical analysis to try to figure out what we do and don’t know about data sets. I’m also a human rights advocate; I work with groups all over the world to help survivors in post-conflict countries understand what really happened and bring justice and accountability. It’s incredible work, and I feel grateful to do it.
I want to invite you to check out a new newsletter, Structural Zero. It’s written by me and my colleagues Megan Price, Bailey Passmore, Tarak Shah, and ...
Structural Zero Issue 02
July 17, 2025
Part Two of Our Three Part “Gathering the Data” Series. Read part one.Â
As a statistician, I spend most of my days working at a computer.
Because I work with data about human rights violations, I go to places where I can document evidence of crimes—like disappearances, killings, and torture. So while I may just be working at a computer, those computers can be in places where there is still the potential for violence to emerge.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about how to work in countries emerging from conflict. Those lessons seem especially applicable today, ...
I want to invite you to check out HRDAG's new newsletter, Structural Zero. It’s written by me and my colleagues Megan Price, Bailey Passmore, Tarak Shah, and Maria Gargiulo. Each month, one of us will write about a mathematical or scientific concept we use in our work and how it can be applied to understanding the world. We’ll offer some of the real world examples we've come across, including the times when we or our partners worked to collect and process data in very dangerous situations. We’ll talk about some of the key insights we've uncovered through our work, and the cultural context for understanding what those insights mean.
You ...
A lot of scientists and AI developers think that involving affected communities in AI research is probably the right thing to do, ethically. But they hesitate because they fear the messy unpredictability of human participation. They worry that even if human participation is the moral choice, it could degrade the science.
