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Beka Steorts Named MIT Under-35 Innovator

We’ve known for years that Beka Steorts is on the cutting-edge of statistical science, and now The MIT Technology Review has realized the same. Last week she was named one of 35 Innovators Under 35, in the category of humanitarian. We first became familiar with Beka's work in 2013 when she was a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon and was introduced to us by Prof. Steve Fienberg. Since then, we’ve felt very fortunate to collaborate with her on projects such as the UN enumeration of casualties in the Syrian conflict, and we look forward to many more years of work with her. She is one of several young stars we include in our superheroine hall ...

Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group Publishes 2010 Analysis of Human Rights Violations in Five Countries,

Analysis of Uncovered Government Data from Guatemala and Chad Clarifies History and Supports Criminal Prosecutions
By Ann Harrison
The past year of research by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) has supported criminal prosecutions and uncovered the truth about political violence in Guatemala, Iran, Colombia, Chad and Liberia. On today’s celebration of the 62nd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, HRDAG invites the international community to engage scientifically defensible methodologies that illuminate all human rights violations – including those that cannot be directly observed. 2011 will mark the 20th year that HRDAG researchers have analyzed the patterns and magnitude of human rights violations in political conflicts to determine how many of the killed and disappeared have never been accounted for – and who is most responsible.

Ciencia de datos para trazar un mapa de la crueldad a la mexicana

From the article: Esta entidad, que existe desde 1991, es liderada por su fundador, Patrick Ball, un científico que acumula una experiencia de más de 25 años realizando análisis cuantitativos en los lugares y en las situaciones más convulsos del planeta. Sobre su colaboración con el proyecto del predictor de fosas clandestinas en México, único en el mundo, Ball afirmó en entrevista:

“Cuando hablamos de crímenes de lesa humanidad estamos hablando de instituciones, de organizaciones grandes, cometiendo miles o centenares de miles  de violaciones a víctimas distribuidas sobre una geografía enorme. Para entender los patrones en esas violaciones, la estadística puede brindar una mirada sobre quiénes son los responsables materiales e intelectuales, quiénes son las víctimas y dónde o cuándo pasaron esas violaciones. Pero la estadística no es contabilidad, pues no estamos hablando solamente de las violaciones que podemos ver, sino que también debemos calcular las violaciones no observadas, las escondidas, invisibles, para incluir en nuestro análisis la totalidad de las violaciones”.

Amstat People News for November 2021

“The 36th Rafto Prize was awarded to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) for their work on uncovering large-scale human rights violations. By using statistics and data science, HRDAG documents human rights violations that might otherwise go undetected. Their approach has enabled courts to bring perpetrators to justice and given closure to affected victims and their families.”

Welcoming Our New Foundation Relations and Strategy Lead

On March 16, Kristen Yawitz joined the HRDAG team in the role of Foundation Relations and Strategy Lead.

How We Choose Projects

For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been carving out a niche in the international human rights movement. We know what we’re good at and what we’re not qualified to do. We know what quantitative questions we think are important for the community, and we know what we like to do. These preferences guide us as we consider whether to take on a project. We’re scientists, so our priorities will come as no surprise. We like to stick to science (not ideology), avoid advocacy, answer quantifiable questions, and increase our scientific understanding. While we have no hard-and-fast rules about what projects to take on, we organize our deliberation ...

In Pursuit of Excellent Data Processing

With help from HRDAG, Roman Rivera built the data backbone for the Invisible Institute's Citizens Police Data Project.

HRDAG’s Year End Review: 2019

In 2019, HRDAG aimed to count those who haven't been counted.

Guatemala’s Bol de la Cruz Found Guilty

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 ...

South Africa

Under apartheid, South Africans from all sides suffered violence and human rights abuses. One of the mandates of the the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was to report truth by reporting on violations and victims. Dr. Patrick Ball, as Deputy Director of the Science and Human Rights Program (SHRP) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), used the who-did-what-to-whom data model to provide statistical analysis of the violations reported to the Commission, for use in the final report of the TRC.     Links: http://shr.aaas.org/southafrica/trcsa/ http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/index....

Justice Unknown, Justice Unsatisfied? Bosnian NGOs Speak about the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Kristen Cibelli and Tamy Guberek. “Justice Unknown, Justice Unsatisfied? Bosnian NGOs Speak about the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.” A project of Education and Public Inquiry and International Citizenship at Tufts University. December, 2000.

Overbooking’s Impact on Pre-Trial Risk Assessment Tools

How do police officer booking decisions affect tools relied upon by judges?

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...

The Great Lessons in Research at the Archive

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...

Podcast: Dr. Patrick Ball on Using Statistics to Uncover Truth

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 ...

Download: Megan Price

nyt_square_logoExecutive director Megan Price is interviewed in The New York Times’ Sunday Review, as part of a series known as “Download,” which features a biosketch of “Influencers and their interests.”

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.

Using MSE to Estimate Unobserved Events

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.

Lancet Study Estimates Gaza Death Toll 40% Higher Than Recorded

“Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.

Ball told AFP the well-tested technique has been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”

Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools

Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG's Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made contributions to the primer.>>

Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG’s Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made significant contributions to the primer.>>

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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