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Help Us Advance Justice And Human Rights Your donations enable HRDAG to use data science and help our partners answer important questions about human rights and patterns of mass violence. Or Write a Check If you prefer to donate by check, please make it payable to: “Community Partners for HRDAG” Mail it to: Community Partners P. O. Box 741265 Los Angeles, CA 90074-1265

Featured Video

Kristian Lum, lead statistician at HRDAG | Predictive Policing: Bias In, Bias Out | 56 mins

The Death Toll in Syria

Media Contact

To speak with the researchers at HRDAG, please fill out the form below. You can search our Press Room by keyword or by year.

HRDAG contributes to textbook Counting Civilian Casualties

Next week, on June 11, Oxford University Press officially puts Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict on the market. This textbook, edited by Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff, responds to the increasing concern for civilians in conflict and aims to promote scientific dialogue by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the most commonly used casualty recording and estimation techniques. HRDAG is very well represented here, as our colleagues have co-authored four chapters, and Nicholas Jewell, who sits on our Science Committee, has co-authored a fifth. ...

HRDAG Wins the Rafto Prize

The Rafto Foundation, an international human rights organization, has bestowed the 2021 Rafto Prize to HRDAG for its distinguished work defending human rights and democracy.

Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses

“If you’re not careful, you risk automating the exact same biases these programs are supposed to eliminate,” says Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the San Francisco-based, non-profit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). Last year, Lum and a co-author showed that PredPol, a program for police departments that predicts hotspots where future crime might occur, could potentially get stuck in a feedback loop of over-policing majority black and brown neighbourhoods. The program was “learning” from previous crime reports. For Samuel Sinyangwe, a justice activist and policy researcher, this kind of approach is “especially nefarious” because police can say: “We’re not being biased, we’re just doing what the math tells us.” And the public perception might be that the algorithms are impartial.

Estimating Deaths in Timor-Leste

Estimating the human toll in Syria

Megan Price (2017). Estimating the human toll in Syria. Nature. 8 February 2017. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved. Nature Human Behaviour. ISSN 2397-3374.

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.”

La misión de contar muertos

The Data Scientist Helping to Create Ethical Robots

Kristian Lum is focusing on artificial intelligence and the controversial use of predictive policing and sentencing programs.

What’s the relationship between statistics and AI and machine learning?

AI seems to be a sort of catchall for predictive modeling and computer modeling. There was this great tweet that said something like, “It’s AI when you’re trying to raise money, ML when you’re trying to hire developers, and statistics when you’re actually doing it.” I thought that was pretty accurate.

Download: Megan Price

nyt_square_logo Executive 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.”

Historic verdict in Guatemala—Gen.Efraín Ríos Montt found guilty

I've been working with various projects in Guatemala to document mass violence since 1993, so in 2011, when Claudia Paz y Paz asked me to revisit the analysis I did for the Commission for Historical Clarification examining the differential mortality rates due to homicide for indigenous and non-indigenous people in the Ixil region, I was delighted. We have far better data processing and statistical methods than we had in 1998, plus much more data. I think the resulting analysis is a conservative lower bound on total homicides of indigenous people. (more…)

Los asesinatos de líderes sociales que quedan fuera de las cuentas

Una investigación de Dejusticia y Human Rights Data Analysis Group concluyó que hay un subconteo en los asesinatos de líderes sociales en Colombia. Es decir, que el aumento de estos crímenes en 2016 y 2017 podría ser incluso mayor al reportado por las organizaciones y por las cifras oficiales.

Trips to and from Guatemala

HRDAG has been working with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala (hereafter, the Archive) for the past seven years. The Archive contains a treasure trove of data recorded and kept by the Guatemalan National Police over the past century. When the Archive was first discovered in 2005, researchers there immediately recognized both the value and fragility of the tens of millions of documents. As a result, they reached out to HRDAG, and we reached out to volunteers at Westat to devise a plan to estimate the contents of the entire Archive as quickly as possible in case the documents were destroyed or access to them was limited. ...

El problema del asesinato a líderes es más grave de lo que se piensa

Una investigación de Dejusticia y Human Rights Data Analysis Group asegura que en Colombia hay un subregistro de los asesinatos de líderes sociales que se han perpetrado en Colombia. Al analizar las diferentes cifras de homicidios que han publicado diversas organizaciones desde 2016, se llegó a la conclusión que la problemática es mayor de lo que se cree.

Counting the Dead in Syria

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