This new report by the United Nations Office of High Commissioner of Human Rights builds on three prior analyses and new statistical analysis by HRDAG on killings in Syria.
677 results for search: %E3%80%88%ED%95%98%EC%95%882%EB%8F%99%EB%8F%99%EC%95%84%EB%A6%AC%E3%80%89%20WWW-MEDA-PW%20%20%EA%B9%80%EC%A0%9C%EB%8C%81%EC%86%8C%EA%B0%9C%ED%8C%85%EC%96%B4%ED%94%8C%20%EA%B9%80%EC%A0%9C%EB%8C%81%EC%86%8C%EC%85%9C%D1%86%EA%B9%80%EC%A0%9C%EB%8C%81%EC%86%94%EB%A1%9C%D1%8B%EA%B9%80%EC%A0%9C%EB%8C%81%EC%88%9C%EC%9C%84%E3%8B%B2%E3%82%87%E8%92%80secretory/feed/rss2/chad-photo-essay/privacy
Reflections: A Simple Plan
I got an email from my superheroic PhD adviser in June 2006: Would I be interested in relocating to Palo Alto for six months in order to work with Patrick Ball at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group? (She'd gotten a grant and would cover my stipend.) Since I'd spent the last several months in New Haven wrestling ineffectually with giant, brain-melting methodological problems, I said yes immediately.
The plan with my adviser was simple: I'd digitize the ancient, multiply-photocopied pages of data from the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, combine them with two other datasets, match across all the records, and produce reliable ...
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 ...
New report published on 500 Tamils missing while in Army custody
The International Truth and Justice Project and HRDAG have published a report on 500 Tamils who disappeared while in Army custody in Sri Lanka in 2009.
The report is titled “How many people disappeared on 17-19 May 2009 in Sri Lanka?” and Patrick Ball, director of research at HRDAG, is the lead author.
What we’ll need to find the true COVID-19 death toll
From the article: “Intentionally inconsistent tracking can also influence the final tally, notes Megan Price, a statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. During the Iraq War, for example, officials worked to conceal mortality or to cherry pick existing data to steer the political narrative. While wars are handled differently from pandemics, Price thinks the COVID-19 data could still be at risk of this kind of manipulation.”
A look at the top contenders for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize
The Washington Post’s Paul Schemm recognized HRDAG’s work in Syria, in the category of research and activism. “HRDAG gained renown at the start of the war, when it was one of the few organizations that tried to put a number on the war’s enormous toll in Syrian lives.”
Amstat People News for November 2021
“The 36th Rafto Prize was awarded to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) for their work on uncovering large-scale human rights violations. By using statistics and data science, HRDAG documents human rights violations that might otherwise go undetected. Their approach has enabled courts to bring perpetrators to justice and given closure to affected victims and their families.”
The Rafto Prize 2021 to Human Rights Data Analysis Group
“The Rafto Prize 2021 is awarded to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) for their wide-reaching documentation of grave human rights abuses. By using statistics and data science they uncover large-scale human rights violations that might otherwise go undetected. This novel approach has enabled courts to bring perpetrators to justice and given closure to affected victims and their families. HRDAG represents a new generation of human rights defenders that advances the enforcement of human rights globally.”
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.
The ‘Dirty War Index’ and the Real World of Armed Conflict.
Amelia Hoover, Romesh Silva, Tamy Guberek, and Daniel Guzmán. “The ‘Dirty War Index’ and the Real World of Armed Conflict.” May 23, 2009. © 2009 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.
Learning to Learn: Reflections on My Time at HRDAG
So much of what I learned at HRDAG was intangible, and I'm grateful to have been able to go deep.
Always Learning
The data science field is always changing, which means that I'll always be learning.
Welcoming Our 2019 Human Rights Intern
Trina Reynolds-Tyler is HRDAG's 2019 Human Rights Intern.
Welcoming Our 2018 Data Science Fellow
Shemika Lamare has joined the HRDAG team as our new data science fellow.
HRDAG is hiring – technical lead
If this could be you, let us know. Also, please feel free to pass on this link to great people.
Job Title. Technical lead with a hacker's heart
Location. A cool office in SOMA, San Francisco. You need to be on-site with us.
What we do. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) develops statistical techniques to measure human rights atrocities. Our work helps bring dictators to justice through data analysis of human rights atrocities around the world. Over more than 20 years, our small team has developed technology and statistical techniques to take disjoint, incomplete, and inaccurate information from conflict zones and process it to identify ...
Release of Yellow Book Calls on Salvadoran Military to Open Archives
With the release today of a civil war-era catalog of “enemies,” Salvadorans are calling for a new look at the 12-year civil war during which hundreds of citizens were victims of human rights violations such as torture, forced disappearance, and illegal imprisonment.
The recently leaked document, known as The Yellow Book, is a list created and (more…)
Data ‘hashing’ improves estimate of the number of victims in databases
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.”
The story of one document inside the AHPN
The beginnings are crucial in every step—as critical as the beginning of sound, life, hope, and justice. Here are some first steps from the AHPN (Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional).
This is the story of Oficio Number COC/207-laov, a document that at first appears uninteresting. But this is not just any oficio*. This is one of the many documents that helped bring to trial the people responsible for the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García. A father, husband, son, and student, García was, like many people today, interested in changing his community for the better. (more…)