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How many people have died in the Syrian civil war?


Justice Served in Guatemala: Testimonies from The National Security Archive & Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group


Guatemala: Access to Archives Sheds Light on Case of Forced Disappearance


Unbiased algorithms can still be problematic

“Usually, the thing you’re trying to predict in a lot of these cases is something like rearrest,” Lum said. “So even if we are perfectly able to predict that, we’re still left with the problem that the human or systemic or institutional biases are generating biased arrests. And so, you still have to contextualize even your 100 percent accuracy with is the data really measuring what you think it’s measuring? Is the data itself generated by a fair process?”

HRDAG Director of Research Patrick Ball, in agreement with Lum, argued that it’s perhaps more practical to move it away from bias at the individual level and instead call it bias at the institutional or structural level. If a police department, for example, is convinced it needs to police one neighborhood more than another, it’s not as relevant if that officer is a racist individual, he said.


Even if there’s a ceasefire, thousands of deaths projected in Gaza over next 6 months

In this NPR story, HRDAG’s Patrick Ball comments on first-of-its-kind projections.


PRIO Director Henrik Urdal’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize Shortlist

Henrik Urdal has released his final Nobel Shortlist for 2022, and HRDAG is included on it, alongside Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Alexei Navalny, and others. The list highlights pro-democracy efforts, multilateral cooperation, combating religious extremism and intolerance, and the value that research and knowledge can have for promoting peace.


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.

Letter from the Executive Director

Dear Friends, This has been quite a year, and I don’t just mean the recent political events in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Thanks to your ongoing support, HRDAG has a number of accomplishments to be proud of this year: Patrick’s testimony in the trial of Hissene Habré for crimes against humanity was cited by the judges three times in their determination of guilt. We launched a book describing ten years of collaborative work with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala. We contributed quantitative analyses to Amnesty International’s report on deaths in Syrian custody, and published an ...

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 ...

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?

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.

Welcoming Our 2019 Data Science Fellow

We’re pleased to announce that Camille Fassett has joined our team as our new data science fellow.

Disrupt San Francisco TechCrunch 2018

On September 7, 2018, Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball participated in a panel at Disrupt San Francisco by TechCrunch. The talk was titled "Dismantling Algorithmic Bias." Brian Brackeen of Kairos was part of the panel as well, and the talk was moderated by TechCrunch reporter Megan Rose Dickey. From the TechCrunch website, "Disrupt is a 3-day conference focused on breaking technology news and developments with big-name thought leaders who are making waves in the industry." Video of the talk is available here, and Megan Rose Dickey's coverage is here.

HRDAG at FAT* 2020: Pre-Trial Risk Assessment Tools

How do police officer booking decisions affect pre-trial risk assessment tools relied upon by judges?

Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling

Daniel Guzmán (2011) Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling, CHANCE, American Statistical Association, 24, (3), Alexandria, VA. © 2011 CHANCE. All rights reserved.


Reflections: It Began In Bogotá

It was July of 2006, I’d spent five years working at a local human rights NGO in Bogotá, and I had reached retirement age. But then a whole new world opened up for me to discover. Tamy Guberek, then HRDAG Latin America coordinator, whom I had met at the NGO, approached me about becoming part of the HRDAG Colombia team as a research/administrative assistant. Over a cup of suitably Colombian coffee, the deal was quickly "signed.” My responsibilities ranged from fundraising to translations, from support in data gathering for estimates on homicides and disappearances in various regions of Colombia to editorial support to different Benetech-HRDAG ...

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…)

Judges in Habré Trial Cite HRDAG Analysis

Three months after the announcement of the momentous verdict finding former Chadian president Hissène Habré guilty of crimes against humanity, the presiding judges have released the full, written 681-page judgment of the court. Testimony given by HRDAG’s director of research, Patrick Ball, is mentioned at three points in the verdict. The judges included in their written judgment the HRDAG analysis that the mortality rate in Habré prisons was staggeringly high—much higher than the mortality rate among the population as a whole. Here’s an excerpt from the judgment, page 358 (translated by Google): The statistical expert, Patrick Ball, ...

HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2022

This past year at HRDAG has been about continuing efforts to uncover the truth.

Colombia (eng)

Text in English Assessing Claims of Declining Lethal Violence In March 2007, HRDAG published a study entitled "Assessing Claims of Declining Lethal Violence in Colombia." The authors of this report evaluated assertions that violence in Colombia declined after the demobilization of paramilitaries. They showed that these claims rest both on the overinterpretation of unadjusted data and on unsound causal inferences. The authors concluded that multiple data sources are needed to estimate the true rates of violence in Colombia after demobilization and they suggest avenues for further research. This research paper is also available in Spanish at ...

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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