Profile touching on HRDAG’s work on the trial and conviction of Hissène HabrĂ©, its US Policing Project, data integrity, data archaeology and more.
The University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts profiled Patrick Ball in its fall 2016 issue of the alumni magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
Ball believes doing this laborious, difficult work makes the world a more just place because it leads to accountability.
“My part is a specific, narrow piece, which just happens to fit with the skills I have,” he says. “I don’t think that what we do is in any way the best or most important part of human rights activism. Sometimes, we are just a footnote—but we are a really good footnote.”
Coverage of Megan Price at the Women in Data Science Conference held at Stanford University. “Price discussed her organization’s behind-the-scenes work to collect and analyze data on the ground for human rights advocacy organizations. HRDAG partners with a wide variety of human rights organizations, including local grassroots non-governmental groups and—most notably—multiple branches of the United Nations.”
This week, we join our friends and colleagues in feeling horrified by the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we have for the past 26 years, we stand with the victims of violence and support human rights and dignity for all. We spend our careers observing and documenting mass political violence across the world. The demands by the so-called “alt-right” to normalize racism and social exclusion are all too familiar to us.
At HRDAG, our work is always guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). We reaffirm our commitment to these principles, in particular that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and ...
HRDAG and our partners Data CĂvica and the Iberoamericana University created a machine-learning model to predict which counties (municipios) in Mexico have the highest probability of unreported hidden graves. The predictions help advocates to bring public attention and government resources to search for the disappeared in the places where they are most likely to be found.
Context
For more than ten years, Mexican authorities have been discovering hidden graves (fosas clandestinas). The casualties are attributed broadly—and sometimes inaccurately—to the country’s “drug war,” but the motivations and perpetrators behind the mass murders ...
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.”
As the war between the guerrillas, the Army, and paramilitary groups in Colombia winds down, violence against social movement leaders has intensified. Using data from six organizations, this report estimates the total number of social movement leaders killed in 2016 and 2017. The perpetrators of the killings are not reported in the data or in the report.
In the report, we observe that together, the monitoring organizations documented 160 killings in 2016, and we estimate a total population of 166 deaths.[1] In 2017, there were 172 documented killings, and we estimate a total of 185 deaths.[2]
From this, we conclude that the number of killings is ...
Benetech Human Rights Program and CorporaciĂłn 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 ...
