643 results for search: %E5%A4%A7%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E7%9A%84%E4%BC%98%E5%8A%BF%E5%92%8C%E5%8A%A3%E5%8A%BF-%E3%80%90%E2%9C%94%EF%B8%8F%E6%8E%A8%E8%8D%90KK37%C2%B7CC%E2%9C%94%EF%B8%8F%E3%80%91-%E5%90%8C%E6%B2%BB%E6%AF%94%E5%85%89%E7%BB%AA%E5%A4%A7%E5%87%A0%E5%B2%81-%E5%A4%A7%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E7%9A%84%E4%BC%98%E5%8A%BF%E5%92%8C%E5%8A%A3%E5%8A%BFzo9xn-%E3%80%90%E2%9C%94%EF%B8%8F%E6%8E%A8%E8%8D%90KK37%C2%B7CC%E2%9C%94%EF%B8%8F%E3%80%91-%E5%90%8C%E6%B2%BB%E6%AF%94%E5%85%89%E7%BB%AA%E5%A4%A7%E5%87%A0%E5%B2%81p2dn-%E5%A4%A7%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E7%9A%84%E4%BC%98%E5%8A%BF%E5%92%8C%E5%8A%A3%E5%8A%BFblgpy-%E5%90%8C%E6%B2%BB%E6%AF%94%E5%85%89%E7%BB%AA%E5%A4%A7%E5%87%A0%E5%B2%81r26q/feed/rss2/privacy


How Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools Perpetuate Unfairness

Tools like Compas allegedly help judges predict future criminal activities and eliminate bias. HRDAG and partners showed how the tools recycle bias.

Courts and police departments are turning to AI to reduce bias, but some argue it’ll make the problem worse

Kristian Lum: “The historical over-policing of minority communities has led to a disproportionate number of crimes being recorded by the police in those locations. Historical over-policing is then passed through the algorithm to justify the over-policing of those communities.”


Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States

James Johndrow, Patrick Ball, Maria Gargiulo, and Kristian Lum. (2020). Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States. Harvard Data Science Review. 24 November, 2020. © The Authors, 2020, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.7679a1ed

James Johndrow, Patrick Ball, Maria Gargiulo, and Kristian Lum. (2020). Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States. Harvard Data Science Review. 24 November, 2020. © The Authors, 2020, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.7679a1ed


A Comparison of Marginal and Conditional Models for Capture–Recapture Data with Application to Human Rights Violations Data

Shira Mitchell, Al Ozonoff, Alan Zaslavsky, Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, Kristian Lum and Brent Coull (2013). A Comparison of Marginal and Conditional Models for Capture-Recapture Data with Application to Human Rights Violations Data. Biometrics, Volume 69, Issue 4, pages 1022–1032, December 2013. © 2013, The International Biometric Society. DOI: 10.1111/biom.12089.

Shira Mitchell, Al Ozonoff, Alan Zaslavsky, Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, Kristian Lum and Brent Coull (2013). A Comparison of Marginal and Conditional Models for Capture-Recapture Data with Application to Human Rights Violations Data. Biometrics, Volume 69Issue 4pages 1022–1032December 2013. © 2013, The International Biometric Society. DOI: 10.1111/biom.12089.


BJS Report on Arrest-Related Deaths: True Number Likely Much Greater

(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Kristian Lum.) Today the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report on their effort to document “all deaths that occur during the process of arrest in the United States.” The analysis estimates that the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) program covers only 34-49% of these deaths. A parallel program by the FBI (the Supplementary Homicide Reports, SHR) is estimated to cover approximately the same proportion of deaths. Even taking into consideration both programs, 28% of all police homicides remain unreported. In order to estimate the total number of homicides that appear on neither the ARD or ...

New Research on Civilian Deaths and Disappearances in El Salvador

This rigorous estimate shows that 1-2 percent of the country’s population was killed or disappeared during the civil war.

Primer to Inform Discussions about Bail Reform

The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.

Guatemala 1993-1999 – Using MSE to Estimate the Number of Deaths

Propelled by the impact of data analysis in El Salvador, Patrick Ball applied his WDWTW model to human rights information in other countries. Throughout the 1990’s, Ball worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) analyzing large-scale human rights violations in Ethiopia, South Africa, Haiti and Guatemala. Together with senior scientific colleagues, including statistician Dr. Herb Spirer, Ball developed new methods for analyzing state-sanctioned violence. This chapter documents how the research expanded when a group of nongovernmental organizations in Guatemala asked the scientific community to gather and analyze ...

Kosovo Data – Killings, Migrations and More

Much of the debate about the March–June 1999 war between NATO and Yugoslavia turned on how many people left their homes in particular places and at certain times. Solid information about the flow of refugees out of Kosovo has helped investigators to link patterns in the flow to patterns of NATO bombing, Yugoslav strategic plans for "cleansing" Kosovo, and Yugoslav and irregular troop deployments. At its heart, the debate was about whether refugees left their homes fleeing NATO attacks and fighting between the KLA and Yugoslav forces, or whether they left their homes after being threatened, assaulted, and robbed by Yugoslav police, army, and irregu...

How we go about estimating casualties in Syria—Part 1

I spent the two weeks over Easter working with Patrick and Megan in San Francisco, trying to figure out a strategy of how best to estimate the number of casualties the Syrian civil war has claimed in the past two years. In January, HRDAG published a report on the number of fully identified casualties reported in the Syrian Arab Republic between March 2011 and November 2012. The number of de-duplicated records of killings for this period was 59,648, a number that is likely to be an undercount since we know that many incidences of lethal violence in conflict go unreported, and that the unreported cases are not missing at random. (more…)

Police Violence in Puerto Rico: Flooded with Data

Kilómetro Cero is making a comparison of police killings in Puerto Rico and police killings in the non-territorial United States, and HRDAG is helping to organize the data.

Lessons at HRDAG: Making More Syrian Records Usable

If we could glean key missing information from those fields, we would be able to use more records.

Evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book

At the end of 2014 we completed the evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book database and are pleased to conclude that the database has succeeded in documenting all or nearly all the human losses during conflicts in Kosovo during the period from 1998 to 2000. With a motto of "Let people remember people," the goal of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB) is to document all people who were killed or disappeared in connection with the war in Kosovo. The project aimed to document all human losses during armed conflict in the territory of the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) between 1998 and 2000. The KMB database evaluation is the fruition of several years of ...

Talks & Discussions

2021 Rafto Prize Videos .ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper{height:460px !important;background-color:#000000;background-image:url(https://hrdag.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Screen-Shot-2022-12-09-at-3.41.30-PM.png)}.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper:before{background-color:#000000;opacity:0.3}.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper:hover:before{opacity:0.6}.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-block-title{color:#ffffff}.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-block-description{color:#ffffff}@media screen and (max-width:768px){.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper{height:208px !important}}The Rafto Prize 2021 | Rafto Foundation Rafto Foundation | HRDAG team | 2021 | 4 ...

Tech Note: Chicago Missing Persons

Our team was able to identify over 50 complaints related to missing persons cases.

Civil War in Syria: The Internet as a Weapon of War

Suddeutsche Zeitung writer Hakan Tanriverdi interviews HRDAG affiliate Anita Gohdes and writes about her work on the Syrian casualty enumeration project for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. This article, “Bürgerkrieg in Syrien: Das Internet als Kriegswaffe,” is in German.


Court Sentences Two Former Policemen to 40 Years in Prison Todanoticia.com


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?’”


Predictive policing violates more than it protects

William Isaac and Kristian Lum. Predictive policing violates more than it protects. USA Today. December 2, 2016. © USA Today.

William Isaac and Kristian Lum. Predictive policing violates more than it protects. USA Today. December 2, 2016. © USA Today.


Truth Commissioner


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