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Letter from the Executive Director

Dear Friends, This has been quite a year, and I don’t just mean the recent political events in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Thanks to your ongoing support, HRDAG has a number of accomplishments to be proud of this year: Patrick’s testimony in the trial of Hissene Habré for crimes against humanity was cited by the judges three times in their determination of guilt. We launched a book describing ten years of collaborative work with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala. We contributed quantitative analyses to Amnesty International’s report on deaths in Syrian custody, and published an ...

HRDAG Names New Board Members Julie Broome and Frank Schulenburg

We are pleased to announce that HRDAG will be supported by two additions to our Advisory Board, Julie Broome and Frank Schulenburg. We’ve worked with Julie for many years, getting to know her when she was Director of Programmes at The Sigrid Rausing Trust. She is now the Director of London-based Ariadne, a network of European funders and philanthropists. She worked at the Trust for seven years, most notably Head of Human Rights, before becoming Director of Programmes in 2014. Before joining the Trust she was Programme Director at the CEELI Institute in Prague, where she was responsible for conducting rule of law-related trainings for judges and ...

A geeky deep-dive: database deduplication to identify victims of human rights violations

In our work, we merge many databases to figure out how many people have been killed in violent conflict. Merging is a lot harder than you might think. Many of the database records refer to the same people--the records are duplicated. We want to identify and link all the records that refer to the same victims so that each victim is counted only once, and so that we can use the structure of overlapping records to do multiple systems estimation. Merging records that refer to the same person is called entity resolution, database deduplication, or record linkage. For definitive overviews of the field, see Scheuren, Herzog, and Winkler, Data Quality ...

Patrick Ball wins the Karl E. Peace Award

Patrick Ball won the Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society at the 2018 Joint Statistical Meeting.

How Coder Cornered Milosevic


Even if there’s a ceasefire, thousands of deaths projected in Gaza over next 6 months

In this NPR story, HRDAG’s Patrick Ball comments on first-of-its-kind projections.


Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling


The Disappearance of Edgar Fernando García


Benetech Statistical Analysis Provides Key Evidence in Conviction of Former Guatemalan Police Officers Testimony From Daniel Guzmán Helps Establish Legal Precedent for Prosecution of Forced Disappearances


More Than 60,000 Have Died in Syrian Conflict, U.N. Says


Cuentas y mediciones de la criminalidad y de la violencia

Exploración y análisis de los datas para comprender la realidad. Patrick Ball y Michael Reed Hurtado. 2015. Forensis 16, no. 1 (July): 529-545. © 2015 Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses (República de Colombia).


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 ...

Kosovo 1999 – Using MSE to Examine Political Claims

Patrick Ball expanded his use of multiple systems estimation (MSE) to clarify the history of a deadly conflict in Kosovo. The violence began in 1989 when Serbian President Slobodan Milošević revoked Kosovo's autonomous status within the Republic of Serbia triggering fighting between Kosovar Albanians and the Yugoslav government. Allegations of widespread and systematic human rights violations were made against Serbian forces and NATO intervened to repel Serb forces from Kosovo. Ball and Scheuren gathered data from Albanian border crossings and other sources in the region. They used this information to examine the claim by the Yugoslav government ...

Third ALGO story

This is a story about pretrial risk assessment.

Primer to Inform Discussions about Bail Reform

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

Casanare, Colombia

Estimates of Killings and Disappearances in Casanare Casanare is a large, rural department or state in Colombia that includes 19 municipalities and a population of almost 300,000 inhabitants. Located in the foothills of the Andes and on the eastern plains, Casanare has a history of violence. Multiple armed groups have operated in Casanare including paramilitaries, guerillas and the Colombian military. Many Casanare citizens have suffered violent deaths and disappearances. But how many people have been killed or disappeared? For reasons of policy, accountability and historical clarification, this question deserves a valid answer. In February ...

Welcoming Our 2021-2022 Human Rights and Data Science Intern

Larry Barrett has joined HRDAG as a Human Rights and Data Science Intern until February, 2022.

Clustering and Solving the Right Problem

In our database deduplication work, we’re trying to figure out which records refer to the same person, and which other records refer to different people. We write software that looks at tens of millions of pairs of records. We calculate a model that assigns each pair of records a probability that the pair of records refers to the same person. This step is called pairwise classification. However, there may be more than just one pair of records that refer to the same person. Sometimes three, four, or more reports of the same death are recorded. So once we have all the pairs classified, we need to decide which groups of records refer to the ...

Guatemalan National Police Archive Project

The Historic Archive of the Guatemalan National Police (hereafter the Archive) was discovered, quite by accident, in July 2005.  Researchers immediately recognized both the importance and the fragility of the Archive's contents.  As a result, in early 2006 the Archive team invited Patrick to evaluate the documents and help them answer a seemingly simple question: How can we learn about the contents of the Archive in a shorter period of time than is needed to systematically examine each individual document? After inspecting the Archive, Patrick designed a multi-stage random sample of documents.  In May 2006, Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, and ...

Release of Yellow Book Calls on Salvadoran Military to Open Archives

With the release today of a civil war-era catalog of “enemies,” Salvadorans are calling for a new look at the 12-year civil war during which hundreds of citizens were victims of human rights violations such as torture, forced disappearance, and illegal imprisonment. The recently leaked document, known as The Yellow Book, is a list created and (more…)

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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