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Over 60,000 Dead in Syria conflict, UN Says


Theoretical limits of microclustering for record linkage

James E Johndrow, Kristian Lum and D B Dunson (2018). Theoretical limits of microclustering for record linkage. Biometrika. 19 March 2018. © 2018 Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/biomet/asy003.

John E Johndrow, Kristian Lum and D B Dunson (2018). Theoretical limits of microclustering for record linkage. Biometrika. 19 March 2018. © 2018 Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/biomet/asy003.


A Comparison of Marginal and Conditional Models for Capture–Recapture Data with Application to Human Rights Violations Data

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, Volume 69Issue 4pages 1022–1032December 2013. © 2013, The International Biometric Society. DOI: 10.1111/biom.12089.


Low-risk population size estimates in the presence of capture heterogeneity

James Johndrow, Kristian Lum and Daniel Manrique-Vallier (2019). Low-risk population size estimates in the presence of capture heterogeneity. Biometrika, asy065, 22 January 2019. © 2019 Biometrika Trust. https://doi.org/10.1093/biomet/asy065

James Johndrow, Kristian Lum and Daniel Manrique-Vallier (2019). Low-risk population size estimates in the presence of capture heterogeneityBiometrika, asy065, 22 January 2019. © 2019 Biometrika Trust. https://doi.org/10.1093/biomet/asy065


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.


New Research on Civilian Deaths and Disappearances in El Salvador

This rigorous estimate shows that 1-2 percent of the country’s population was killed or disappeared during the civil war.

Emeritus Advisers

We are grateful to our past advisers for their contributions to HRDAG. Advisory Board Audrey Chapman, Healey Chair in Medical Humanities and Bioethics, University of Connecticut 2013-2014 (one-year term)

The Disappearance of Edgar Fernando García


More Than 60,000 Have Died in Syrian Conflict, U.N. Says


Evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book at Pristina

On February 4, 2015, at the National Archive in Pristina, Kosovo, HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball gave a presentation on research (done with  colleague Jule Krüger) about the database of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB). The KMB is part of the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade and Pristina). In this photo, Patrick is speaking, and HLC-Belgrade executive director emeritus Natasa Kandic and Professor Michael Spagat are at the table with him. At the laptop between Spagat and Patrick is Laza Lazarevic of HLC; he is part of the KMB team. About 130 people attended—a terrific response. Presentation on the research behind the Evaluation of the ...

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 ...

Locating Hidden Graves in Mexico

For more than 10 years, and with regularity, Mexican authorities have been discovering mass graves, known as fosas clandestinas, in which hundreds of bodies and piles of bones have been found. The casualties are attributed broadly to the country’s “drug war,” although the motivations and perpetrators behind the mass murders are often unknown. Recently, HRDAG collaborated with two partners in Mexico—Data Cívica and Programa de Derechos Humanos of the Universidad Iberoamericana—to model the probability of identifying a hidden grave in each county (municipio). The model uses an set of independent variables and data about graves from 2013 ...

Why It Took So Long To Update the U.N.-Sponsored Syria Death Count

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. FiveThirtyEight Carl Bialik August 23, 2014 Link to story on FiveThirtyEight Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria) Back to Press Room  

Nonprofits Are Taking a Wide-Eyed Look at What Data Could Do

In this story about how data are transforming the nonprofit world, Patrick Ball is quoted. Here's an excerpt: "Data can have a profound impact on certain problems, but nonprofits are kidding themselves if they think the data techniques used by corporations can be applied wholesale to social problems," says Patrick Ball, head of the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Companies, he says, maintain complete data sets. A business knows every product it made last year, when it sold, and to whom. Charities, he says, are a different story. "If you're looking at poverty or trafficking or homicide, we don't have all the data, and we're not going to," ...

Coming soon: HRDAG 2019 Year-End Review

The online version of the 2019 Year-End Review will appear in January 2020.            

In Syria, Uncovering the Truth Behind a Number

Huffington Post Politics writer Matt Easton interviews Patrick Ball, executive director of HRDAG, about the latest enumeration of killings in Syria. As selection bias is increasing, it becomes harder to see it: we have the “appearance of perfect knowledge, when in fact the shape of that knowledge has not changed that much,” says Patrick. “Technology is not a substitute for science.”


Our Thoughts on the Violence in Charlottesville

This week, we join our friends and colleagues in feeling horrified by the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we have for the past 26 years, we stand with the victims of violence and support human rights and dignity for all. We spend our careers observing and documenting mass political violence across the world. The demands by the so-called “alt-right” to normalize racism and social exclusion are all too familiar to us. At HRDAG, our work is always guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). We reaffirm our commitment to these principles, in particular that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and ...

La misión de contar muertos


Ouster of Guatemala’s Attorney General

We were surprised and disappointed to learn that our colleague Claudia Paz y Paz has had her term as Guatemala’s attorney general cut short. The nation’s Constitutional Court ruled on 6 February that her four-year term will end this May, instead of in December. (She was appointed in December 2010, replacing an attorney general who was appointed in May 2010.) During her term, she put four generals from Guatemala’s civil war on the stand for charges of crimes against humanity and genocide, including General José Efraín Ríos Montt, who ruled from 1982 to 1983. We were fortunate to work with her on that trial and to witness the handing down of a ...

Welcoming Our New Data Scientist

We're thrilled to announce that Tarak Shah has joined our team as our new data scientist.

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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