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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.


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.


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.


How data science is changing the face of human rights

100x100siliconangleOn the heels of the Women in Data Science conference, HRDAG executive director Megan Price says, “I think creativity and communication are probably the two most important skills for a data scientist to have these days.”


Weapons of Math Destruction

Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives. Excerpt:

As Patrick once explained to me, you can train an algorithm to predict someone’s height from their weight, but if your whole training set comes from a grade three class, and anyone who’s self-conscious about their weight is allowed to skip the exercise, your model will predict that most people are about four feet tall. The problem isn’t the algorithm, it’s the training data and the lack of correction when the model produces erroneous conclusions.


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.


Sous la dictature d’Hissène Habré, le ridicule tuait

Patrick Ball, un expert en statistiques engagé par les Chambres africaines extraordinaires, a conclu que la « mortalité dans les prisons de la DDS fut substantiellement plus élevée que celles des pires contextes du XXe siècle de prisonniers de guerre ».


Inside the Difficult, Dangerous Work of Tallying the ISIS Death Toll

HRDAG executive director Megan Price is interviewed by Mother Jones. An excerpt: “Violence can be hidden,” says Price. “ISIS has its own agenda. Sometimes that agenda is served by making public things they’ve done, and I have to assume, sometimes it’s served by hiding things they’ve done.”


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.)


Mining data on mutilations, beatings, murders


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.”


Estimating Deaths


Data Mining for Good: Thoreau Center Lunch + Learn

At the Thoreau Center for Sustainability's “Lunch and Learn,” Patrick Ball spoke about “Data Mining for Good.” The talk included a discussion of how HRDAG uses random sampling, entity resolution, communications metadata, and statistical modeling to assist prosecutions of human rights violators. With an introduction by John DeCock, Chief Operating and Outreach Officer, Bioneers. The Thoreau Center for Sustainability Lunch and Learn October 23, 2014 San Francisco, California Back to Talks  

Core Concepts

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 ...

Uncovering Police Violence in Chicago: A collaboration between HRDAG and Invisible Institute

In 2014 and again in 2020, the Invisible Institute, a Chicago grassroots organization, won lawsuits that granted them access to decades of complaints of misconduct by Chicago police officers. The collection contains hundreds of thousands of pages of allegation forms, memos, various police administrative forms, interviews and testimonies, pictures, and even embedded audio files. The Institute published scanned images on the Citizens Police Data Project, and is using them for a project with HRDAG known as Beneath the Surface, which is a detailed investigation into gender-based violence by Chicago Police. Image: David Peters Often, gender-b...

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

Donate with Cryptocurrency

Help HRDAG use data science to work for justice, accountability, and human rights. We are nonpartisan and nonprofit, but we are not neutral; we are always on the side of human rights. Cryptocurrency donations to 501(c)3 charities receive the same tax treatment as stocks. Your donation is a non-taxable event, meaning you do not owe capital gains tax on the appreciated amount and can deduct it on your taxes. This makes Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency donations one of the most tax efficient ways to support us. We are a team of experts in machine learning, applied and mathematical statistics, computer science, demography, and social science, and ...

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 ...

November 1st Statement from Alejandra García at the close of her Father’s trial


Using Data and Statistics to Bring Down Dictators

In this story, Guerrini discusses the impact of HRDAG’s work in Guatemala, especially the trials of General José Efraín Ríos Montt and Colonel Héctor Bol de la Cruz, as well as work in El Salvador, Syria, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste. Multiple systems estimation and the perils of using raw data to draw conclusions are also addressed.
Megan Price and Patrick Ball are quoted, especially in regard to how to use raw data.
“From our perspective,” Price says, “the solution to that is both to stay very close to the data, to be very conservative in your interpretation of it and to be very clear about where the data came from, how it was collected, what its limitations might be, and to a certain extent to be skeptical about it, to ask yourself questions like, ‘What is missing from this data?’ and ‘How might that missing information change these conclusions that I’m trying to draw?’”


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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