710 results for search: %E3%80%94%EC%A4%91%EB%85%84%ED%8F%B0%ED%8C%85%E3%80%95%20WWW%E0%BC%9DPAYO%E0%BC%9DPW%20%20%EB%B2%95%EC%A0%84%EB%A7%8C%EB%82%A8%ED%86%A1%20%EB%B2%95%EC%A0%84%EB%AA%A8%EC%9E%84%EC%96%B4%ED%94%8C%E2%88%83%EB%B2%95%EC%A0%84%EB%AF%B8%ED%8C%85%EC%96%B4%ED%94%8C%E2%97%86%EB%B2%95%EC%A0%84%EB%B2%88%EA%B0%9C%ED%8C%85%E2%92%AA%E3%81%B4%E9%B9%80lewdness/feed/content/colombia/copyright

Making the Case. Investigating Large Scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis

Patrick Ball, Herbert F. Spirer, and Louise Spirer, eds. Making the Case. Investigating Large Scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis . © 2000 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. [full text] [intro] [chapters 1 2 3 4 5 67 8 9 10 11 12]

What HBR Gets Wrong About Algorithms and Bias

“Kristian Lum… organized a workshop together with Elizabeth Bender, a staff attorney for the NY Legal Aid Society and former public defender, and Terrence Wilkerson, an innocent man who had been arrested and could not afford bail. Together, they shared first hand experience about the obstacles and inefficiencies that occur in the legal system, providing valuable context to the debate around COMPAS.”

Death Toll In Syria Jumps To Nearly 93,000

Mapping Mexico’s hidden graves

When Patrick Ball was introduced to Ibero’s database, the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group in San Francisco, California, saw an opportunity to turn the data into a predictive model. Ball, who has used similar models to document human rights violations from Syria to Guatemala, soon invited Data Cívica, a Mexico City–based nonprofit that creates tools for analyzing data, to join the project.

Want to know a police officer’s job history? There’s a new tool

NPR Illinois has covered the new National Police Index, created by HRDAG’s Tarak Shah, Ayyub Ibrahim of Innocence Project, and Sam Stecklow of Invisible Institute.

Can We Harness AI To Fulfill The Promise Of Universal Human Rights?

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group employs AI to analyze data from conflict zones, identifying patterns of human rights abuses that might be overlooked. This assists international organizations in holding perpetrators accountable.

‘Bias deep inside the code’: the problem with AI ‘ethics’ in Silicon Valley

Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and an expert on algorithmic bias, said she hoped Stanford’s stumble made the institution think more deeply about representation.

“This type of oversight makes me worried that their stated commitment to the other important values and goals – like taking seriously creating AI to serve the ‘collective needs of humanity’ – is also empty PR spin and this will be nothing more than a vanity project for those attached to it,” she wrote in an email.

War and Illness Could Kill 85,000 Gazans in 6 Months

HRDAG director of research Patrick Ball is quoted in this New York Times article about a paper that models death tolls in Gaza.

Quantifying Injustice

“In 2016, two researchers, the statistician Kristian Lum and the political scientist William Isaac, set out to measure the bias in predictive policing algorithms. They chose as their example a program called PredPol.  … Lum and Isaac faced a conundrum: if official data on crimes is biased, how can you test a crime prediction model? To solve this technique, they turned to a technique used in statistics and machine learning called the synthetic population.”

On or off the record? Detecting patterns of silence about death in Guatemala’s National Police Archive

Tamy Guberek and Margaret Hedstrom (2017). On or off the record? Detecting patterns of silence about death in Guatemala’s National Police Archive. Archival Science. 9 February 2017. © Springer. DOI 10.1007/s10502-017-9274-3.

Tamy Guberek and Margaret Hedstrom (2017). On or off the record? Detecting patterns of silence about death in Guatemala’s National Police Archive. Archival Science. 9 February 2017. © Springer. DOI 10.1007/s10502-017-9274-3.

The Statistics of Genocide

Patrick Ball and Megan Price (2018). The Statistics of Genocide. Chance (special issue). February 2018. © 2018 CHANCE.

Working Where Statistics and Human Rights Meet

Robin Mejia and Megan Price (2018). Working Where Statistics and Human Rights Meet. Chance (special issue). February 2018. © 2018 CHANCE.

Data Mining for Good: CJA Drink + Think

At the Center for Justice and Accountability's happy hour, "Drink and Think," Patrick Ball spoke about "Data Mining for Good." The talk included a discussion of how HRDAG brings human rights abusers to justice through data analysis, and HRDAG's work conducting quantitative analysis for truth commissions, NGOs, the UN and other partners. The event was held at Eventbrite. More photos are below. The Center for Justice and Accountability Young Professionals' Committee for Human Rights September 16, 2014 San Francisco, California Link to CJA event page Back to Talks   All photos © 2014 Carter Brooks.

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 ...

Celebrating our First Anniversary and Welcoming Our Newest Board Member

One year ago, HRDAG cast out on its own as an independent nonprofit—and this first year has been busy, productive, and exciting. We’re indebted to our Advisory Board for their valuable contributions and to our funders for their generosity and participation in our mission. Highlights of the past year include contributing testimony to three court cases, publishing two reports on conflict-casualties in Syria, presenting over a dozen talks (many of which are available on our talks page), traveling to over half a dozen countries to testify, collaborate with partners, and participate in conferences/workshops, hiring a new technical lead, and bringing in ...

HRDAG Offers New R Package – dga

Much of the work we do at HRDAG involves estimating the number of undocumented deaths using a statistical technique called multiple systems estimation (MSE, described in more detail here). One of our goals is to make this class of methods more broadly available to human rights researchers. In particular, we are finding that Bayesian approaches are extremely valuable for MSE. Accordingly, we are pleased to offer a new R package called dga (“decomposable graphs approach”) that performs Bayesian model averaging for MSE. The main function in this package implements a model created by David Madigan and Jeremy York. This model was designed to ...

HRDAG and Amnesty International: Prison Mortality in Syria

Today Amnesty International released “‘It breaks the human’: Torture, disease and death in Syria’s prisons ,” a report detailing the conditions and mortality in Syrian prisons from 2011 to 2015, including data analysis conducted by HRDAG. The report provides harrowing accounts of ill treatment of detainees in Syrian prisons since the conflict erupted in March 2011, and publishes HRDAG’s estimate of the number of killings that occurred inside the prisons. To accompany the report, HRDAG has released a technical memo that explains the methodology, sources, and implications of the findings. The HRDAG team used data from four ...

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 ...

Reflections: Some Stories Shape You

The first time I met anyone at HRDAG, I was a journalist. It was 2006. I was working on a story about a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon who’d collaborated with the organization on a survey in Sierra Leone, and I contacted Patrick Ball to discuss the work. At the time, I found him challenging. But I thought his work—trying to estimate how many people were killed, or, in that study, otherwise injured, during wars—was fascinating. Over the next few years, I got to know other researchers working on similar questions. In 2008, as the war in Iraq ramped up, I spoke with epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University, the World Health Organiz...

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.

Donate

HRDAG

Selected projects

Stay informed about our work

©2025 Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Some rights reserved.
HRDAG is a non-profit project of Community Partners®, tax ID 95-4302067
Privacy Policy