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HRDAG Names New Board Member Margot Gerritsen

Margot is a professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University, interested in computer simulation and mathematical analysis of engineering processes.

Kristian Lum in Bloomberg

The interview poses questions about Lum's focus on artificial intelligence and its impact on predictive policing and sentencing programs.

Nonprofits Are Taking a Wide-Eyed Look at What Data Could Do

In this story about how data are transforming the nonprofit world, Patrick Ball is quoted. Here's an excerpt: "Data can have a profound impact on certain problems, but nonprofits are kidding themselves if they think the data techniques used by corporations can be applied wholesale to social problems," says Patrick Ball, head of the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Companies, he says, maintain complete data sets. A business knows every product it made last year, when it sold, and to whom. Charities, he says, are a different story. "If you're looking at poverty or trafficking or homicide, we don't have all the data, and we're not going to," ...

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The Death Toll in Syria


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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. ...

Syrian civil war death toll exceeds 190,000, U.N. reports

Ayan Sheikh of PBS News Hour reports on 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: The latest death toll figure covers the period from March 2011 to April of this year, came from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and is the third study of its kind on Syria. The analysis group identified 191,269 deaths. Data was collected from five different sources to exclude inaccuracies and repetitions. PBS News Hour Ayan Sheikh August 22, 2014 Link to story on PBS News Hour Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria) Back to Press Room

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.


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.


Welcoming our new Technical Lead

After almost two months of searching for the perfect fit, we’re very pleased to announce that Josh Shadlen has joined HRDAG as our new technical lead. Finding Josh was no easy feat. We were looking for what many people would call a “data scientist,” that is, someone with expertise in both computer science and statistics. These days, “data science” is one of the hottest fields out there. Bringing the perfect mix of academic depth and thoughtful reflection, Josh stood out for us. With prior jobs including gigs at Silicon Valley startups and Twitter, he’s got high-level (more…)

Truth Commissioner


Estimating Deaths in Timor-Leste


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

/whodidwhattowhom/contents.html

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.


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.”


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.


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.


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_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.”


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.”


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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