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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.”


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.”


Syria’s status, the migrant crisis and talking to ISIS

In this week’s “Top Picks,” IRIN interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about giant data sets and whether we can trust them. “No matter how big it is, data on violence is always partial,” he says.


5 Humanitarian FOSS Projects to Watch

Dave Neary described “5 Humanitarian FOSS Projects to Watch,” listing HRDAG’s work on police homicides in the U.S. and other human rights abuses in other countries.


That Higher Count Of Police Killings May Still Be 25 Percent Too Low.

Carl Bialik of 538 Politics reports on a new HRDAG study authored by Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball regarding the Bureau of Justice Statistics report about the number of annual police killings, which was issued a few weeks ago. As Bialik writes, the HRDAG scientists extrapolated from their work in five other countries (Colombia, Guatemala, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Syria) to estimate that the BJS study missed approximately one quarter of the total number of killings by police.


Experts Greet Kosovo Memory Book

On Wednesday, February 4, in Pristina, international experts praised the Humanitarian Law Centre’s database on victims of the Kosovo conflict, the Kosovo Memory Book. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted in the article that appeared in Balkan Transitional Justice.


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.”


“El reto de la estadística es encontrar lo escondido”: experto en manejo de datos sobre el conflicto

In this interview with Colombian newspaper El Espectador, Patrick Ball is quoted as saying “la gente que no conoce de álgebra nunca debería hacer estadísticas” (people who don’t know algebra should never do statistics).


Machine learning is being used to uncover the mass graves of Mexico’s missing

“Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s Director of Research and the statistician behind the code, explained that the Random Forest classifier was able to predict with 100% accuracy which counties that would go on to have mass graves found in them in 2014 by using the model against data from 2013. The model also predicted the counties that did not have mass hidden graves found in them, but that show a high likelihood of the possibility. This prediction aspect of the model is the part that holds the most potential for future research.”


Documenting Syrian Deaths with Data Science

Coverage of Megan Price at the Women in Data Science Conference held at Stanford University. “Price discussed her organization’s behind-the-scenes work to collect and analyze data on the ground for human rights advocacy organizations. HRDAG partners with a wide variety of human rights organizations, including local grassroots non-governmental groups and—most notably—multiple branches of the United Nations.”


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.


One Better

The University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts profiled Patrick Ball in its fall 2016 issue of the alumni magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

Ball believes doing this laborious, difficult work makes the world a more just place because it leads to accountability.

“My part is a specific, narrow piece, which just happens to fit with the skills I have,” he says. “I don’t think that what we do is in any way the best or most important part of human rights activism. Sometimes, we are just a footnote—but we are a really good footnote.”


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.”


Amnesty International Reports Organized Murder Of Detainees In Syrian Prison

100x100nprReports of torture and disappearances in Syria are not new. But the Amnesty International report says the magnitude and severity of abuse has “increased drastically” since 2011. Citing the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, the report says “at least 17,723 people were killed in government custody between March 2011 and December 2015, an average of 300 deaths each month.”


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.


Hunting for Mexico’s mass graves with machine learning

“The model uses obvious predictor variables, Ball says, such as whether or not a drug lab has been busted in that county, or if the county borders the United States, or the ocean, but also includes less-obvious predictor variables such as the percentage of the county that is mountainous, the presence of highways, and the academic results of primary and secondary school students in the county.”


What happens when you look at crime by the numbers

Kristian Lum’s work on the HRDAG Policing Project is referred to here: “In fact, Lum argues, it’s not clear how well this model worked at depicting the situation in Oakland. Those data on drug crimes were biased, she now reports. The problem was not deliberate, she says. Rather, data collectors just missed some criminals and crime sites. So data on them never made it into her model.”


HRDAG at Strata Conference 2014

Last Thursday, HRDAG co-founder and director of research Megan Price presented at Strata, the conference for data scientists and people who work with "big data." In her talk, she addressed the question of how we can know the actual number of conflict casualties in Syrian. Her short answer was, "We don't know." The longer answer was that we have a very good idea of how many conflict casualties have been reported, by several documentation groups, and that we're working on analyzing (more…)

Sierra Leone TRC Data and Statistical Appendix

HRDAG assisted the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission in building a systematic data coding system, electronic database, and secure data analysis process to manage the thousands of statements given to them in the course of their work. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and HRDAG field consultant Richard Conibere worked at the TRC full-time for approximately eighteen months starting in March 2003. HRDAG worked with TRC researchers to help them incorporate quantitative findings to support the qualitative findings in their writing for the other chapters of the TRC report. In addition, HRDAG produced a Statistical Appendix to present ...

Data coding and inter-rater reliability (IRR)

Data coding is the process of converting unstructured information, such as a narrative testimony, into discrete facts such as names and roles of actors (victims, witnesses, perpetrators) in crimes, as well as the date and place of act. Data coding must not discard or distort information. When more than one person is identifying, classifying and counting the elements reported in a qualitative source, the results of what they find may differ slightly based on each individual's interpretation and care in doing the coding. These differences can be measured by measuring IRR (inter-rater reliability). We give the same source document to several coders and ...

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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