Daniel Manrique-Vallier, Patrick Ball, Mauricio Sadinle. (2022). Capture-Recapture for Casualty Estimation and Beyond: Recent Advances and Research Directions. In: Carriquiry, A.L., Tanur, J.M., Eddy, W.F. (eds) Statistics in the Public Interest. Springer Series in the Data Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75460-0_2
Manrique-Vallier, D., Ball, P., Sadinle, M. (2022). Capture-Recapture for Casualty Estimation and Beyond: Recent Advances and Research Directions. In: Carriquiry, A.L., Tanur, J.M., Eddy, W.F. (eds) Statistics in the Public Interest. Springer Series in the Data Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75460-0_2
Much of the debate about the March–June 1999 war between NATO and Yugoslavia turned on how many people left their homes in particular places and at certain times. Solid information about the flow of refugees out of Kosovo has helped investigators to link patterns in the flow to patterns of NATO bombing, Yugoslav strategic plans for "cleansing" Kosovo, and Yugoslav and irregular troop deployments. At its heart, the debate was about whether refugees left their homes fleeing NATO attacks and fighting between the KLA and Yugoslav forces, or whether they left their homes after being threatened, assaulted, and robbed by Yugoslav police, army, and irregu...
Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, and Patrick Ball. 2015. Significance 12, no. 2 (April): 14–19. doi: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2015.00811.x. © 2015 The Royal Statistical Society. All rights reserved. [online abstract]
The modular nature of the workflow and use of Git allowed us to work on different parts of the project from across the country.
Today Guatemala’s former national police chief Colonel Héctor Rafael Bol de la Cruz was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the 1984 kidnapping and disappearance of 27-year-old student union leader Fernando Garcia, who was last seen when officers detained him outside his home. Along with Bol de la Cruz, former senior police officer Jorge Gomez was also tried; he received a sentence of 40 years in prison. That verdict comes in part because of testimony this month by HRDAG’s Patrick Ball, who served as an expert witness and presented data analysis done with colleague Daniel Guzmán to assess the flow of thousands of ...
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, ...
We have accomplished so much in the last 10 years at the Historical Archive of the National Police. And yet, despite the efforts, dedication, and commitment of each person who since 2006 has worked in the AHPN, we still can not say “mission accomplished.”
In 10 years the environment at the Archive has changed so much and become so full of life. Where the building once sheltered unknown stories, over time some of those stories have been revealed. But Guatemala has a long way to go in letting the world get to know more deeply about the secrets within the documents stored there.
Guatemalans and the rest of the world have a very important ...
Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s Overestimation of Utility and Risk. Logic(s). 13 December, 2023. Issue 20.
Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s Overestimation of Utility and Risk. Logic(s). 13 December, 2023. Issue 20.
Dr. Patrick Ball recently visited the Plutopia News Network podcast for a wide-ranging, inspiring conversation about his work for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
Patrick spoke about how he first discovered human rights work during his time in El Salvador with the Peace Brigades International. That led to his ongoing work as a statistician and computer programmer working to assess and analyze human rights violations. He also unpacked some common statistical techniques used by researchers at Human Rights Data Analysis Group, such as multiple systems estimation, which uses multiple different datasets to gain insights into the data we don't ...
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.
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.
With so many dashboards and shiny visualizations, how can an interested non-technical reader find good science among the noise?
I spent last weekend in Istanbul at an excellent conference organized by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies (SCPSS). The conference included numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Syria as well as international human rights researchers and advocates. Families of victims told their stories, data collection groups discussed the challenges, and need, to document violations, transitional justice experts worried about infrastructure such as the police force and judicial system, and local leaders pledged to work together for peace.
I was invited to speak about HRDAG's recent report examining killings in Syria documented by ...
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…)
Kristian Lum (2017). Limitations of mitigating judicial bias with machine learning. Nature. 26 June 2017. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved. Nature Human Behavior. DOI 10.1038/s41562-017-0141.
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Kristian Lum (2017). Limitations of mitigating judicial bias with machine learning. Nature. 26 June 2017. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved. Nature Human Behavior. DOI 10.1038/s41562-017-0141.
Shira Mitchell, Al Ozonoff, Alan Zaslavsky, Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, Kristian Lum and Brent Coull (2013). A Comparison of Marginal and Conditional Models for Capture-Recapture Data with Application to Human Rights Violations Data. Biometrics, Volume 69, Issue 4, pages 1022–1032, December 2013. © 2013, The International Biometric Society. DOI: 10.1111/biom.12089.
Shira Mitchell, Al Ozonoff, Alan Zaslavsky, Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, Kristian Lum and Brent Coull (2013). A Comparison of Marginal and Conditional Models for Capture-Recapture Data with Application to Human Rights Violations Data. Biometrics, , Issue 4, pages 1022–1032, December 2013. © 2013, The International Biometric Society. DOI: 10.1111/biom.12089.
Patrick Ball and Megan Price (2019). Using Statistics to Assess Lethal Violence in Civil and Inter-State War. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Volume 6. 7 March 2019. © 2019 Annual Reviews. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-statistics-030718-105222.
Patrick Ball and Megan Price (2019). Using Statistics to Assess Lethal Violence in Civil and Inter-State War. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application. 7 March 2019. © 2019 Annual Reviews. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-statistics-030718-105222.
