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La estadística de mortalidad del conflicto en Perú

En ese artículo respondemos a una crítica del estudio de mortalidad que realizamos para la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación en 2003.

The AHPN: Home of Stories Old and New

Access to the records contained in archives is a concern shared by many. Archives support memory and free access to them strengthens democratic processes. Everyone should be allowed to see first-hand the records contained in an archive and be free to interpret them as needed. Access to archives can increase knowledge on various topics and opens opportunities for different fields of knowledge. (more…)

Privacy Policy

Mailing List Subscription We use Mailchimp to help us keep track of community members who want to stay informed about what HRDAG is doing and thinking. If you self-subscribe to our list, we will never share your contact information. We will never subscribe anyone who does not explicitly agree to a subscription.  Over the course of a year, we mail quarterly letters and fundraising letters, as well as one or two updates as events demand. If, during the course of a fundraising campaign, you make a donation, we will do our best to remove you from the remainder of fundraising mailings that year. We may use your contact information to invite you to ...

The Day We Fight Back

Today, February 11, is the day of national protests against the National Security Administration. The critical threat is mass surveillance. In the words of The Day We Fight Back, “Together we will push back against powers that seek to observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action. Together, we will make it clear that such behavior is not compatible with democratic governance. Together, if we persist, we will win this fight.” (more…)

‘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.


12 Questions about Using Data Analysis to Bring Guatemalan War Criminals to Justice

When people talk about war criminals in Guatemala, which war are they talking about? They’re talking about the Guatemalan civil war, which began in 1960 and ended in 1996. That’s thirty-six years of civil war. Even though it ended almost two decades ago, Guatemala is still recovering from it. At its simplest, this civil war story was right-wing government forces fighting leftist rebels. But it went deeper than that, of course. The majority of the rebel forces was composed of indigenous peoples, primarily the Maya, (more…)

Policing

If you'd like to support HRDAG in this project, please consider making a donation via Our Donate page. Over the last year, HRDAG has deepened the national conversation about homicides by police, predictive policing software, and the role that bail plays in the criminal justice system. Our studies describe how the racial bias inherent in police practice becomes data input to predictive policing tools. In another project, we are shining light on the iniquities of bail decisions. TEAM Click each team member's photo for full bio. Here's the team on Twitter. Examining the Impact of Bail When a defendant is detained before trial, she will face ...

El Salvador

Some of the earliest large-scale human rights information projects happened in El Salvador. One was developed by Patrick Ball at the Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission, also known as Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES-ng). Between 1977 and 1990, more than 9,000 testimonies were taken in an effort to document the nature and scope of the bloody conflict between the army and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Starting in 1991, Patrick worked with CDHES staff to organize the information in an early computer database. They linked reported human rights violations with the career structures of individual ...

Syria

On the heels of the Arab Spring revolutions, which began in December 2010, armed conflicts began in Syria in March 2011. What started as protests demanding that President Bashar al-Assad resign resulted in the deployment of the Syrian Army to stop the uprising. Since then, violent conflict has been raging in Syria. Amid this continuing violence and humanitarian crisis, local human rights activists and citizen journalists risk their lives to document human rights violations. The grave challenges they face are compounded by the regime's active suppression of information flow out of the country. As a result, there is considerable uncertainty about the ...

HRDAG is hiring – technical lead

If this could be you, let us know. Also, please feel free to pass on this link to great people. Job Title. Technical lead with a hacker's heart Location. A cool office in SOMA, San Francisco. You need to be on-site with us. What we do. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) develops statistical techniques to measure human rights atrocities. Our work helps bring dictators to justice through data analysis of human rights atrocities around the world. Over more than 20 years, our small team has developed technology and statistical techniques to take disjoint, incomplete, and inaccurate information from conflict zones and process it to identify ...

Update on Work in Guatemala and the AHPN

HRDAG has sampled and analyzed documents at Guatemala's AHPN and has testified against war criminals based on that analysis.

Liberia 2009 – Coding Testimony to Determine Accountability for War Crimes

In July 2009, HRDAG concluded a three-year project with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to help clarify Liberia’s violent history and hold perpetrators accountable. A military coup in 1979 sparked 24 years of civil war in Liberia where warring factions subjected civilians to severe human rights abuses. The TRC sought to determine whether these violations represented a systematic pattern or policy. This chapter describes how HRDAG developed a statistical analysis of the more than 17,000 victim and witness statements collected by the TRC and applied Ball’s “Who Did What To Whom?” methodology. HRDAG scientist Kristen ...

Data Collection and Documentation for Truth-Seeking and Accountability

Megan Price and Patrick Ball (2014). The Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre. © 2014 SJAC.Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Timor-Leste

During the violence in Timor-Leste in June 2006, armed gangs broke into the offices of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in Dili and stole their motorbikes. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group, then at Benetech®, and other human rights observers wondered whether the mobs would soon return to loot the irreplaceable paper records used by the CAVR to compile their definitive report entitled "Chega!" The Benetech Initiative contributed to the CAVR findings and released a separate statistical report (PDF) establishing that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of human rights violations in Timor-Leste ...

Archivists Can Be At the Heart of Accountability and Justice


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, ...

The Statistics of Mortality Due to Conflict in Peru

A key point is that human rights data collection prior to the TRC largely ignored violence by the Shining Path.

UN Raises Estimate of Dead in Syrian Conflict to 191,000

Nick Cumming-Bruce of the New York Times writes about the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Right’s release of HRDAG’s third report on reported killings in the Syrian conflict.
From the article:
In its third report on Syria commissioned by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group identified 191,369 deaths from the start of the conflict in March 2011 to April 2014, more than double the 92,901 deaths cited in their last report, which covered the first two years of the conflict.
“Tragically, it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict,” Ms. Pillay said in a statement that accompanied the report, which observed that many killings in Syria were undocumented.


Datasets available for research

Over the last few years, we've tried to make the data organized in our projects publicly accessible. We have encouraged our partners to publish the data at the completion of the project. We continue to believe it is important to offer access to the data used in our projects for the sake of transparency as well as to encourage further research and analysis. However, we are increasingly concerned about how raw data are used. Data collected by what we can observe is what statisticians call a convenience sample, which is subject to selection bias. We're keeping these datasets available for researchers who want to use them for simulation or estimation ...

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 ...

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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