Donating to HRDAG
Thank you for your interest in making a donation to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group to help us use science to support our partners in the human rights world.
You can make a donation by credit card on the Community Partners® Network for Good page. HRDAG is a "project of Community Partners," and right below the section on payment information, you'll be able to select "Human Rights Data Analysis Group" from a drop-down menu. (On most browsers, if you use this link, HRDAG will be pre-selected on the drop-down menu.)
This transaction will appear on your credit card statement as "Network for Good."
If you donate by check, ...
This post introduces the methodology of the Innocence Discovery Lab, a collaboration between IPNO and HRDAG.
Inaccurate statistics can damage the credibility of human rights claims—and that's why we strive to ensure that statistics about human rights violations are generated with as much rigor and are as scientifically accurate as possible.
But, what are the pitfalls leading to inaccuracy—when, where, and how do data become compromised? How are patterns biased by having only partial data? And what are the best scientific methods for collecting, managing, processing and analyzing data?
Here are the data pitfalls that HRDAG has identified, as well as some of our approaches for meeting these challenges. We believe that human rights researchers must take ...
The World According to Artificial Intelligence: Targeted by Algorithm (Part 1)
The Big Picture: The World According to AI explores how artificial intelligence is being used today, and what it means to those on its receiving end.
Patrick Ball is interviewed: “Machine learning is pretty good at finding elements out of a huge pool of non-elements… But we’ll get a lot of false positives along the way.”
In 2001, President Alejandro Toledo, called for the establishment of the Comision de la Verdad y Reconciliacion (CVR) (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) to investigate human rights abuses in Perú between 1980 and 2000. Dr. Patrick Ball was invited to work with the Commission to evaluate the CVR technical work and make recommendations on the information management process and analytic strategies. HRDAG consultant Jana Asher worked with Dr. Ball and CVR staff members David Sulmont (Director Informations Systems) and Daniel Manrique (Database Expert) to present evidence of the violations in a report to the CVR.
The work included new estimates of ...
En ocasiones, las discusiones sobre ese fenómeno se centran más sobre cuál es la cifra real, mientras que el diagnóstico es el mismo: en las regiones la violencia no cede y no se avizoran políticas efectivas para ponerle fin. En medio de este complejo panorama, el Centro de Estudios de Derecho, Justicia y Sociedad (Dejusticia) y el Human Rights Data Analysis Group, publicaron este miércoles la investigación Asesinatos de líderes sociales en Colombia en 2016–2017: una estimación del universo.
From the article: “As we seek to advance the responsible use of data for racial injustice, we encourage individuals and organizations to support and build upon efforts already underway.” HRDAG is listed in the Data Driven Activism and Advocacy category.
Doing an investigation on the contents of the Archive brought with it three major lessons. The first big lesson was the constant movement (nothing was static), The second great lesson was that everything evolved (the changes were a constant). The third major lesson was to discover how two institutions can work together while geographically far apart.
The constant movement
As there were other processes being carried out at the Archive, everything was in constant movement. In other words, one day the documents were in X location and tomorrow they may be in location Y or dispersed in multiple locations. This made it impossible to know with certai...
In this story, Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about the process of de-duplication, integration of databases, and machine-learning in the recent enumeration of reported casualties in Syria.
New reports of old deaths come in all the time, Ball said, making it tough to maintain a database. The duplicate-removal process means “it’s a lot like redoing the whole project each time,” he said.
This morning I got a query from a journalist asking for our data from the report we published yesterday. The journalist was hoping to create an interactive infographic to track the number of deaths in the Syrian conflict over time. Our data would not support an analysis like the one proposed, so I wrote this reply.
We can't send you these data because they would be misleading—seriously misleading—for the purpose you describe. Here's why:
What we have is a list of documented deaths, in essence, a highly non-random sample, though a very big one. We like bigger samples because we think that they must be closer to true. The mathematical justificat...
In a CNN interview predicting a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Henrik Urdal from PRIO talks about his shortlist and HRDAG.
At the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings, Patrick Ball discussed his invited paper, "Human Rights Violations: How Do We Begin Counting the Dead?" Also at the JSM, he was honored as a new Fellow of the American Statistical Association and inducted by ASA President Nathaniel Schenker.
Joint Statistical Meetings
August 7, 2014
Boston, Massachusetts
Link to JSM 2014 online program
Back to Talks
With help from HRDAG, Roman Rivera built the data backbone for the Invisible Institute's Citizens Police Data Project.
Today The Tor Project announced that it has elected a new Board of Directors, and among them is HRDAG executive director Megan Price. The Tor Project is a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes online privacy and provides software that helps users opt out of online tracking.
Megan and Patrick have long maintained that encryption and privacy are essential for enabling human rights work. Patrick's ideas are described in Monday's FedScoop story about encryption, human rights, and the U.S. State Department.
“Human rights groups depend on strong cryptography in order to hold governments accountable," says Patrick. "HRDAG depends on local human ...
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.
