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Innocence Discovery Lab – Harnessing Large Language Models to Surface Data Buried in Wrongful Conviction Case Documents

Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, and Tarak Shah (2024). “Innocence Discovery Lab - Harnessing Large Language Models to Surface Data Buried in Wrongful Conviction Case Documents." The Wrongful Conviction Law Review 5 (1):103-25. https://doi.org/10.29173/wclawr112. 31 May, 2024. Copyright (c) 2024 Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, Tarak Shah. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, and Tarak Shah (2024). “Innocence Discovery Lab – Harnessing Large Language Models to Surface Data Buried in Wrongful Conviction Case Documents.” The Wrongful Conviction Law Review 5 (1):103-25. https://doi.org/10.29173/wclawr112. 31 May, 2024. Copyright (c) 2024 Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, Tarak Shah. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


HRDAG Retreat 2015

I look at the beach and then at the table surrounded by nerds, deep in thought and conversation about Dirichlet priors, matching algorithms, and armed conflicts. This peculiar (in the best way) environment catalyzes a moment of reflection: how did I get here? Four years ago, as a second-year statistics PhD student, I watched "Guatemala: The Secret Files" on PBS Frontline World. I listened to stories of family members who disappeared without answers or justice. Then the story shifted to the work being done by archivists and data experts at Guatemala's Historic Archive of the National Police. The scientists' pursuit of the truth energized me. I ...

The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool

Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. ACLU. Summer 2023.

Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. ACLU. Summer 2023.


Happy Hacking

From my first introduction to the HRDAG community at the annual retreat it was clear to me that mentorship is an organizational priority and that the contributions of interns are valued. Much of my first couple weeks as a summer intern at HRDAG were spent familiarizing myself with Patrick’s paradigm for principled data processing. At the same time, I was learning the skills and tricks (bash, make, vim, git) that promote an effortless programming workflow, a pursuit that Patrick calls “sharpening the saw” (just like in programming, you can cut down a tree with a dull blade, but your life will be much easier if you take the time to sharpen ...

How many people are infected with Covid-19?

Tarak Shah (2020). How many people are infected with Covid-19? Significance. 09 April 2020. © 2020 The Royal Statistical Society.

Tarak Shah (2020). How many people are infected with Covid-19? Significance. 09 April 2020. © 2020 The Royal Statistical Society.


Reflections: Richard Savage’s Vision Fulfilled

In 1984, as a fresh PhD, I heard Richard Savage give his presidential address at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Philadelphia. He called it "Hard/Soft Problems" and made a big pitch for statisticians to get involved in human rights data analysis. It was inspirational, and I was immediately sold. I started working with the American Statistical Association's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (now chaired by HRDAG's own Megan Price). Over time, a growing set of statisticians became involved, initially in letter-writing campaigns to help dissident statisticians (and other quantitative academics—economists seemed to have a particular ...

Analysis of Homicide Patterns in Colombia

Last week Forensis, the Colombian National Institute of Forensic Medicine’s flagship publication, published the first of our analyses of homicide patterns in Colombia. Authored by HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and UN colleague Michael Reed Hurtado, “Cuentas y mediciones de la criminalidad y de la violencia” (pages 529-545) explores, as the title suggests, the quality of “truth” contained within crime registries. Citing the problem of partial data, missing data, and inherent design bias, Patrick and Michael write that no register, official or unofficial, can present a true reflection of what has really happened. This publication...

verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia

Maria Gargiulo, María Julia Durán, Paula Andrea Amado, and Patrick Ball (2024). verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia. The Journal of Open Source Software. 6 January, 2024. 9(93), 5844, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05844. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Maria Gargiulo, María Julia Durán, Paula Andrea Amado, and Patrick Ball (2024). verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia. The Journal of Open Source Software. 6 January, 2024. 9(93), 5844, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05844. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Identifiers of Detained Children Have Implications for Data Security and Estimation

Identifiers being sequential could make possible estimations of the population of detained children.

Training with HRDAG: Rules for Organizing Data and More

I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Ball at the HRDAG office in San Francisco for a week during summer 2016. I knew Patrick from two workshops he previously hosted at the University of Washington’s Centre for Human Rights (UWCHR). The workshops were indispensable to us at UWCHR as we worked to publish a number of datasets on human rights violations during the El Salvador Civil War.  The training was all the more helpful because the HRDAG team was so familiar with the data. As part of an impressive career which took him from Ethiopia and Kosovo to Haiti and El Salvador among others, Patrick himself had worked on gathering and analysing ...

Learning Day by Day: Quantitative Research at the AHPN

Working at the Historic Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala, there are many skills I learned on the job. My many years of work on the team that studies the recovered documents have been like a custom-made course in how to do quantitative research. The Archive documents I study are the result of 36 years of creation during civil war (1960 to 1996). Many of these documents are simply administrative—but we are able to use them to understand patterns that occurred during the conflict, to get a sense of what mattered to the National Police and what didn’t. Our quantitative research shows us the Police behavior in broad strokes. ...

Frequently Asked Questions

Multiple Systems Estimation What is MSE?  What do you mean by statistical inference?  What is an overlap, and how do we know when lists overlap?   How does MSE find the total number of violations?  How was MSE originally developed?  How does the Benetech Human Rights Program use MSE?    1. What is MSE? A: Multiple Systems Estimation, or MSE, is a family of techniques for statistical inference. MSE uses the overlaps between several incomplete lists of human rights violations to determine the total number of violations. Return to Top 2. What do you mean by statistical inference? A: ...

Press Release, Timor-Leste, February 2006

SILICON VALLEY GROUP USES TECHNOLOGY TO HELP THE TRUTH COMMISSION ANSWER DISPUTED QUESTIONS ABOUT MASSIVE POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN TIMOR-LESTE Palo Alto, CA, February 9, 2006 – The Benetech® Initiative today released a statistical report detailing widespread and systematic violations in Timor-Leste during the period 1974-1999. Benetech's statistical analysis establishes that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of the conflict. Approximately 18,600 (+/- 1000) Timorese were killed or disappeared, while the remainder died due to hunger and illness in excess of what would be expected due to peacetime mortality. The magnitude of deaths ...

Focus on Good Science, not Scientists

We recently learned about an article by Dr Nafeez Ahmed that criticizes the methods and conclusions of the Iraq Body Count (IBC) and the work of Professor Michael Spagat. Dr Ahmed cites our work extensively in support of his arguments, so we think it’s useful for us to reply. We welcome Dr Ahmed’s summary of various points of scientific debate about mortality due to violence, specifically in Iraq and Colombia. We think these are very important questions for the analysis of data about violent conflict, and indeed, about data analysis more generally. We appreciate his exploration of the technical nuances of this difficult field. Unfortunately, ...

Multiple Systems Estimation: Collection, Cleaning and Canonicalization of Data

<< Previous post: MSE: The Basics Q3. What are the steps in an MSE analysis? Q4. What does data collection look like in the human rights context? What kind of data do you collect? Q5. [In depth] Do you include unnamed or anonymous victims in the matching process? Q6. What do you mean by "cleaning" and "canonicalization?" Q7. [In depth] What are some of the challenges of canonicalization? (more…)

Multiple Systems Estimation: The Matching Process

<<Previous post: Collection, Cleaning, and Canonicalization of Data Q8. What do you mean by "overlap," and why are overlaps important? Q9. [In depth] Why is automated matching so important, and what process do you use to match records?  Q8. What do you mean by "overlap," and why are overlaps important? MSE estimates the total number of violations by comparing the size of the overlap(s) between lists of human rights violations to the sizes of the lists themselves. By "overlap," we mean the set of incidents, such as deaths, that appear on more than one list of human rights violations. Accurately and efficiently identifying overlaps between ...

Verdad al acecho (The Truth Is Stalking)


New analysis of World War II Korean “comfort women” held by Japanese

There may have been more undocumented World War II-era Korean "comfort women" than known.

Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice

Patrick Ball (2016). Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice. Foreign Policy. October 19, 2016. © 2016 Foreign Policy. 

Patrick Ball (2016). Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice. Foreign Policy. October 19, 2016. © 2016 Foreign Policy


UN says nearly 93,000 confirmed killed in Syrian conflict


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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