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HRDAG Names New Board Member William Isaac

William Isaac joins HRDAG's Advisory Board, bringing expertise in fairness and artificial intelligence.

Truth Commissioner

From the Guatemalan military to the South African apartheid police, code cruncher Patrick Ball singles out the perpetrators of political violence.


Data ‘hashing’ improves estimate of the number of victims in databases

But while HRDAG’s estimate relied on the painstaking efforts of human workers to carefully weed out potential duplicate records, hashing with statistical estimation proved to be faster, easier and less expensive. The researchers said hashing also had the important advantage of a sharp confidence interval: The range of error is plus or minus 1,772, or less than 1 percent of the total number of victims.

“The big win from this method is that we can quickly calculate the probable number of unique elements in a dataset with many duplicates,” said Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s director of research. “We can do a lot with this estimate.”


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


Who Did What to Whom? Planning and Implementing a Large Scale Human Rights Data Project

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Patrick Ball. Who Did What to Whom? Planning and Implementing a Large Scale Human Rights Data Project. © 1996 American Association for the Advancement of Science.


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.

How do epidemiologists know how many people will get Covid-19?

Patrick Ball (2020). How do epidemiologists know how many people will get Covid-19? Significance. 09 April 2020. © 2020 The Royal Statistical Society.

Patrick Ball (2020). How do epidemiologists know how many people will get Covid-19? Significance. 09 April 2020. © 2020 The Royal Statistical Society.


Lessons at HRDAG: Holding Public Institutions Accountable

Principled Data Processing is a way to prove to someone, usually yourself, that what you did was right.

Reflections: Challenging Tasks and Meticulous Defenders

I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.

Reflections: HRDAG Was Born in Washington

I began working with HRDAG in the summer of 2001 before it was ever even called HRDAG. In fact, not intended as a boast, I think I’m responsible for coming up with the name. After contracting with Dr. Patrick Ball for a time writing the Analyzer data management platform, I left New York City and joined him in Washington, DC, at AAAS in 2002. Soon after starting, Patrick decided to establish an identity for this new team, consisting mainly of myself, Miguel Cruz and a handful of field relationships. We discussed what to name it briefly in the AAAS Science & Policy break room, which at the time, being in the mind of unclever descriptive naming ...

Reflections: A Love Letter to HRDAG

On the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, HRDAG executive director Megan Price tells us why she loves her work, and why she feels hopeful about the future.

Changes at HRDAG

A special announcement from the HRDAG Advisory Board: Beginning officially on December 1, HRDAG is changing leadership. After nearly three years as Executive Director, Patrick Ball will become the new Director of Research. Megan Price will be the new Executive Director. Patrick has spent more than 25 years working at the intersection of human rights and statistical science. Over that time, he has finely honed statistical methodology for quantifying mass killings. Now he is excited about the chance to go deeper into research for HRDAG and develop additional approaches for new problems. In his new role, Patrick will focus more on technical coding ...

Applications of Multiple Systems Estimation in Human Rights Research

Lum, Kristian, Megan Emily Price, and David Banks. 2013. The American Statistician 67, no. 4: 191-200. doi: 10.1080/00031305.2013.821093. © 2013 The American Statistician. All rights reserved. [free eprint may be available].


Data Science Symposium at Vanderbilt

Patrick Ball keynoted the Data Science Symposium at Vanderbilt University.

Preserving Human Rights Data with the Filecoin Network: A Journey into the Decentralized Web with HRDAG

Patrick Ball (2024). Preserving Human Rights Data with the Filecoin Network: A Journey into the Decentralized Web with HRDAG. Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. 18 April, 2024.

Patrick Ball (2024). Preserving Human Rights Data with the Filecoin Network: A Journey into the Decentralized Web with HRDAG. Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. 18 April, 2024.


Momentous Verdict against Hissène Habré

Today we’re very pleased to hear of the verdict finding Hissène Habré guilty of crimes against humanity. Habré, president of Chad from 1982 to 1990, has been sentenced to life in prison in Dakar, Senegal, where he was tried. He is the first former head of state to be tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity in one country (Chad) by the courts of another country (Senegal).  Here’s more on the verdict from The Guardian. The verdict resonates especially with HRDAG because of our role in the trial. In September 2015, director of research Patrick Ball testified as an expert witness about the very high rates of prison mortality in ...

Rionegro

Text in English El uso de información de cementerios en la búsqueda de los desaparecidos: lecciones de un estudio piloto en Rionegro, Antioquia, Colombia Entre mayo y julio de 2009, investigadores del Grupo de Análisis de Datos de Derechos Humanos de Benetech (HRDAG por su sigla en inglés), condujeron un estudio piloto que examinó los patrones de la información sobre los cadáveres sin identificar en el cementerio de Rionegro, un municipio en el departamento de Antioquia, Colombia. El estudio se realizó en apoyo a los actuales esfuerzos de la organización socia de HRDAG, EQUITAS (Equipo Colombiano Interdisciplinario de Trabajo Forense y ...

La importancia de la estadística

Patrick Ball (2018). La importancia de la estadística. Ibero. La revista de la universidad Iberoamericana. August-September 2018. © 2018 Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México. Pp. 50-51.

Patrick Ball (2018). La importancia de la estadística. Ibero. La revista de la universidad Iberoamericana. August-September 2018. © 2018 Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México. Pp. 50-51.


Learning to Learn: Reflections on My Time at HRDAG

So much of what I learned at HRDAG was intangible, and I'm grateful to have been able to go deep.

Scatter and keep working

Structural Zero Issue 02 July 17, 2025 Part Two of Our Three Part “Gathering the Data” Series. Read part one.  As a statistician, I spend most of my days working at a computer. Because I work with data about human rights violations, I go to places where I can document evidence of crimes—like disappearances, killings, and torture. So while I may just be working at a computer, those computers can be in places where there is still the potential for violence to emerge. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about how to work in countries emerging from conflict. Those lessons seem especially applicable today, ...

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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