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New UN report counts 191,369 Syrian-war deaths — but the truth is probably much, much worse

Amanda Taub of Vox has interviewed HRDAG executive director 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:
Patrick Ball, Executive Director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and one of the report’s authors, explained to me that this new report is not a statistical estimate of the number of people killed in the conflict so far. Rather, it’s an actual list of specific victims who have been identified by name, date, and location of death. (The report only tracked violent killings, not “excess mortality” deaths from from disease or hunger that the conflict is causing indirectly.)


5 Questions for Kristian Lum

Kristian Lum discusses the challenges of getting accurate data from conflict zones, as well as her concerns about predictive policing if law enforcement gets it wrong.


The ghost in the machine

“Every kind of classification system – human or machine – has several kinds of errors it might make,” [Patrick Ball] says. “To frame that in a machine learning context, what kind of error do we want the machine to make?” HRDAG’s work on predictive policing shows that “predictive policing” finds patterns in police records, not patterns in occurrence of crime.


How statistics lifts the fog of war in Syria

Megan Price, director of research, is quoted from her Strata talk, regarding how to handle multiple data sources in conflicts such as the one in Syria. From the blogpost:
“The true number of casualties in conflicts like the Syrian war seems unknowable, but the mission of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is to make sense of such information, clouded as it is by the fog of war. They do this not by nominating one source of information as the “best”, but instead with statistical modeling of the differences between sources.”


What HBR Gets Wrong About Algorithms and Bias

“Kristian Lum… organized a workshop together with Elizabeth Bender, a staff attorney for the NY Legal Aid Society and former public defender, and Terrence Wilkerson, an innocent man who had been arrested and could not afford bail. Together, they shared first hand experience about the obstacles and inefficiencies that occur in the legal system, providing valuable context to the debate around COMPAS.”


A Human Rights Statistician Finds Truth In Numbers

The tension started in the witness room. “You could feel the stress rolling off the walls in there,” Patrick Ball remembers. “I can remember realizing that this is why lawyers wear sport coats – you can’t see all the sweat on their arms and back.” He was, you could say, a little nervous to be cross-examined by Slobodan Milosevic.


Calculations for the Greater Good

Rollins School of Public HealthAs executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, Megan Price uses statistics to shine the light on human rights abuses.


Trump’s “extreme-vetting” software will discriminate against immigrants “Under a veneer of objectivity,” say experts

Kristian Lum, lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (and letter signatory), fears that “in order to flag even a small proportion of future terrorists, this tool will likely flag a huge number of people who would never go on to be terrorists,” and that “these ‘false positives’ will be real people who would never have gone on to commit criminal acts but will suffer the consequences of being flagged just the same.”


The Forensic Humanitarian

International human rights work attracts activists and lawyers, diplomats and retired politicians. One of the most admired figures in the field, however, is a ponytailed statistics guru from Silicon Valley named Patrick Ball, who has spent nearly two decades fashioning a career for himself at the intersection of mathematics and murder. You could call him a forensic humanitarian.


Death March

A mapped representation of the scale and spread of killings in Syria. HRDAG’s director of research, Megan Price, is quoted.


Doing a Number on Violators


Data Mining on the Side of the Angels

“Data, by itself, isn’t truth.” How HRDAG uses data analysis and statistical methods to shed light on mass human rights abuses. Executive director Patrick Ball is quoted from his speech at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany.


The Data Scientist Helping to Create Ethical Robots

Kristian Lum is focusing on artificial intelligence and the controversial use of predictive policing and sentencing programs.

What’s the relationship between statistics and AI and machine learning?

AI seems to be a sort of catchall for predictive modeling and computer modeling. There was this great tweet that said something like, “It’s AI when you’re trying to raise money, ML when you’re trying to hire developers, and statistics when you’re actually doing it.” I thought that was pretty accurate.


Megan Price: Life-Long ‘Math Nerd’ Finds Career in Social Justice

“I was always a math nerd. My mother has a polaroid of me in the fourth grade with my science fair project … . It was the history of mathematics. In college, I was a math major for a year and then switched to statistics.

I always wanted to work in social justice. I was raised by hippies, went to protests when I was young. I always felt I had an obligation to make the world a little bit better.”


Improving the estimate of U.S. police killings

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes about HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and his contribution to Carl Bialik’s article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported, in 538 Politics.


How We Choose Projects

For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been carving out a niche in the international human rights movement. We know what we’re good at and what we’re not qualified to do. We know what quantitative questions we think are important for the community, and we know what we like to do. These preferences guide us as we consider whether to take on a project. We’re scientists, so our priorities will come as no surprise. We like to stick to science (not ideology), avoid advocacy, answer quantifiable questions, and increase our scientific understanding. While we have no hard-and-fast rules about what projects to take on, we organize our deliberation ...

Big Data and Death at UW-Madison

On November 7, 2014, the Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and  the University of Wisconsin Law School, hosted a mini-conference with speakers Jennifer Alix-Garcia, Patrick Ball, Chad Hazlett, Volker Radeloff, and Philip Schrodt to speak about "Big Data and Death." The conference was organized by John Ahlquist and Jon Pevehouse. Big Data and Death Department of Political Science University of Wisconsin–Madison November 7, 2014 Madison, Wisconsin

Pulling the Plug: Network Disruptions and Violence in the Syrian Conflict

At this year's International Studies Association Annual Convention, Anita Gohdes presented a talk titled, "Pulling the Plug: Network Disruptions and Violence in the Syrian Conflict," while director of research Megan Price served on the working group, "Global Trends in War, Conflict, and Political Violence." International Studies Association Annual Convention March 26-29, 2014 Toronto, Canada Link to ISA 2014 program Back to Talks

The Death Toll in Syria


Publications

From time to time, we issue our own scientific reports that focus on the statistical aspects of the data analysis we have done in support of our partners. These reports are non-partisan, and they leave the work of advocacy to our partners. You can search our publications by keyword or by year.

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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