From the article: Esta entidad, que existe desde 1991, es liderada por su fundador, Patrick Ball, un científico que acumula una experiencia de más de 25 años realizando análisis cuantitativos en los lugares y en las situaciones más convulsos del planeta. Sobre su colaboración con el proyecto del predictor de fosas clandestinas en México, único en el mundo, Ball afirmó en entrevista:
“Cuando hablamos de crímenes de lesa humanidad estamos hablando de instituciones, de organizaciones grandes, cometiendo miles o centenares de miles de violaciones a víctimas distribuidas sobre una geografía enorme. Para entender los patrones en esas violaciones, la estadística puede brindar una mirada sobre quiénes son los responsables materiales e intelectuales, quiénes son las víctimas y dónde o cuándo pasaron esas violaciones. Pero la estadística no es contabilidad, pues no estamos hablando solamente de las violaciones que podemos ver, sino que también debemos calcular las violaciones no observadas, las escondidas, invisibles, para incluir en nuestro análisis la totalidad de las violaciones”.
HRDAG director of research Patrick Ball is quoted in this New York Times article about a paper that models death tolls in Gaza.
Nick Cumming-Bruce of the New York Times writes 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:
In its third report on Syria commissioned by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group identified 191,369 deaths from the start of the conflict in March 2011 to April 2014, more than double the 92,901 deaths cited in their last report, which covered the first two years of the conflict.
“Tragically, it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict,” Ms. Pillay said in a statement that accompanied the report, which observed that many killings in Syria were undocumented.
Megan Price, Anita Gohdes and Patrick Ball (2016). Human Rights Data Analysis Group, commissioned by Amnesty International. August 17, 2016. © 2016 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.
Patrick Ball and Jana Asher (2002). “Statistics and Slobodan: Using Data Analysis and Statistics in the War Crimes Trial of Former President Milosevic.” Chance, vol. 15, No. 4, 2002. Reprinted with permission ofChance. © 2002 American Statistical Association. All rights reserved.
As we get ready to begin our fourth year as an independent nonprofit, we are, as always, indebted to our Advisory Board and to our funders for their support and vision. We’re finishing up a busy year that took us to Dakar (for the trial of former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré), Pristina (for the release of the Kosovo Memory Book), Colombia (for work on a book about the Guatemalan Police Archives), and kept us busy here at home working on police violence statistics. But one of our biggest victories has been to score a new, talented, wise Advisory Board member—Michael Bear Kleinman, whom we first met when he was working with Humanity United.
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One of the three main goals of HRDAG is education and outreach, and to that end we use Creative Commons licenses for all of our blogposts and, whenever possible, for our publications. Using a Creative Commons license makes it clear that educators are free to use HRDAG's publications, in their entirety, and with the peace of mind that they are doing so with our blessing.
Also, the use of the Creative Commons license allows us to participate in and encourage the creation of a digital commons, which we feel helps to advance another one of our goals, the creation of knowledge. We feel that it’s important to offer up our publications for use and reuse ...
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Q3. What are the steps in an MSE analysis?
Q4. What does data collection look like in the human rights context? What kind of data do you collect?
Q5. [In depth] Do you include unnamed or anonymous victims in the matching process?
Q6. What do you mean by "cleaning" and "canonicalization?"
Q7. [In depth] What are some of the challenges of canonicalization? (more…)
On March 16, Kristen Yawitz joined the HRDAG team in the role of Foundation Relations and Strategy Lead.
Given a positive test result, what is the probability that an individual has antibodies? This HRDAG-authored
Granta article explains the science.
Violence against women in all its forms is a human rights violation. Most of our HRDAG colleagues are women, and for us, unfortunately, recent campaigns such as #metoo are unsurprising.
Who We Are
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world. We are a team with expertise in mathematical statistics, computer science, demography, and social science. We are non-partisan—we do not take sides in political or military conflicts, nor do we advocate any particular political party or government policy. However, we are not neutral: we are always in favor of human rights. We support the protections established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and ...
In this
Granta article, HRDAG explains that neither the infectiousness nor the deadliness of the disease is set in stone.
HRDAG and our partners Data Cívica 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 ...
I joined the Benetech Human Rights Program at essentially the same time that HRDAG did, coming to Benetech from years of analyzing data for large companies in the transportation, hospitality and retail industries. But the data that HRDAG dealt with was not like the data I was familiar with, and I was fascinated to learn about how they used the data to determine "who did what to whom." Although some of the methodologies were similar to what I had experience with in the for-profit sector, the goals and beneficiaries of the analyses were very different.
At Benetech, I was initially predominantly focused on product management for Martus, a free ...
The interview poses questions about Lum's focus on artificial intelligence and its impact on predictive policing and sentencing programs.
I began working with HRDAG in the summer of 2001 before it was ever even called HRDAG. In fact, not intended as a boast, I think I’m responsible for coming up with the name. After contracting with Dr. Patrick Ball for a time writing the Analyzer data management platform, I left New York City and joined him in Washington, DC, at AAAS in 2002. Soon after starting, Patrick decided to establish an identity for this new team, consisting mainly of myself, Miguel Cruz and a handful of field relationships. We discussed what to name it briefly in the AAAS Science & Policy break room, which at the time, being in the mind of unclever descriptive naming ...
