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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 ...

Reflections: Minding the Gap

How might we learn what we don’t know? HRDAG associate Christine Grillo hits the wayback machine and recalls her first exposure to People Against Bad Things, ideas about bias and correlation versus causation, and truth.

Setting the Record Straight on Predictive Policing and Race

William Isaac and Kristian Lum (2018). Setting the Record Straight on Predictive Policing and Race. In Justice Today. 3 January 2018. © 2018 In Justice Today / Medium.

William Isaac and Kristian Lum (2018). Setting the Record Straight on Predictive Policing and Race. In Justice Today. 3 January 2018. © 2018 In Justice Today / Medium.


A Universal Declaration of a Few Data Rights

Today we celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. At HRDAG, we are non-partisan: we do not favor any party or government in conflicts. But we are not neutral: we are always in favor of human rights. We believe in the power and value of data; as we see it, data distills human actions and existence, all of which have power and value. With this in mind, we propose these seven articles that comprise our declaration of a few data rights (click through the links for some examples). Preamble Whereas data represents the suffering of human beings, Whereas ...

The causal impact of bail on case outcomes for indigent defendants in New York City

Kristian Lum, Erwin Ma and Mike Baiocchi (2017). The causal impact of bail on case outcomes for indigent defendants in New York City. Observational Studies 3 (2017) 39-64. 31 October 2017. © 2017 Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Kristian Lum, Erwin Ma and Mike Baiocchi (2017). The causal impact of bail on case outcomes for indigent defendants in New York City. Observational Studies 3 (2017) 39-64. 31 October 2017. © 2017 Institute of Mathematical Statistics.


Truth and Myth in Sierra Leone: An Empirical Analysis of the Conflict, 1991–2000

Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Romesh Silva, Kristen Cibelli, Jana Asher, Scott Weikart, Patrick Ball, and Wendy Grossman. “Truth and Myth in Sierra Leone: An Empirical Analysis of the Conflict, 1991–2000″ (pdf). A report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the American Bar Association. March 28, 2006.


The Case Against a Golden Key

Patrick Ball (2016). The case against a golden key. Foreign Affairs. September 14, 2016.  ©2016 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Patrick Ball (2016). The case against a golden key. Foreign Affairs. September 14, 2016.  ©2016 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


How Coder Cornered Milosevic


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


Benetech Statistical Analysis Provides Key Evidence in Conviction of Former Guatemalan Police Officers Testimony From Daniel Guzmán Helps Establish Legal Precedent for Prosecution of Forced Disappearances


PRIO 2023 Shortlist for Nobel Peace Prize

In a CNN interview predicting a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Henrik Urdal from PRIO talks about his shortlist and HRDAG.


Always Learning

The data science field is always changing, which means that I'll always be learning.

Stephen Fienberg 1942-2016

We are saddened by the passing of Steve Fienberg yesterday in Pittsburgh, at the age of 74. He is perhaps best known around the world for bringing statistics to science and public policy and was a beloved professor at Carnegie Mellon University. At HRDAG we are in awe of and grateful for the work Steve did formalizing multiple systems estimation. His work on that front blazed a trail and essentially enabled all of our most important analytical work at the intersection of human rights and statistical science. If we are to reduce the amount of human violence in the world, the first task is to determine the scope of the violence, to know how much of ...

HRDAG Retreat 2018

What follows is an elaborate criss-crossing of collaborations—retreat is a time to embrace the productivity that comes with being in the same room.

Limitations of mitigating judicial bias with machine learning

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. .

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.


Views to a Kill: Exploring the Implications of Source Selection in the Case of Guatemalan State Terror, 1977-1996.

Christian Davenport and Patrick Ball. “Views to a Kill: Exploring the Implications of Source Selection in the Case of Guatemalan State Terror, 1977-1996.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 46(3): 427-450. 2002.


Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY).

Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovic, and Jana Asher. Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY). © 2002 American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative. [full text]


Policy or Panic? The Flight of Ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, March–May, 1999.

Patrick Ball. Policy or Panic? The Flight of Ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, March–May, 1999. © 2000 American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Human Rights Program. [pdf – English][html – English][html – shqip (Albanian)] [html – srpski (Serbian)]


HRDAG Wins the Rafto Prize

The Rafto Foundation, an international human rights organization, has bestowed the 2021 Rafto Prize to HRDAG for its distinguished work defending human rights and democracy.

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.”


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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