Kristian Lum’s work on the HRDAG Policing Project is referred to here: “In fact, Lum argues, it’s not clear how well this model worked at depicting the situation in Oakland. Those data on drug crimes were biased, she now reports. The problem was not deliberate, she says. Rather, data collectors just missed some criminals and crime sites. So data on them never made it into her model.”

On the heels of the Women in Data Science conference, HRDAG executive director Megan Price says, “I think creativity and communication are probably the two most important skills for a data scientist to have these days.”

An excerpt: The “It breaks the human” report released by the human rights group Amnesty International highlights new statistics from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, or HRDAG, an organization that uses scientific approaches to analyze human rights violations.

HRDAG analyst William Isaac is quoted in this article about so-called crime prediction. “They’re not predicting the future. What they’re actually predicting is where the next recorded police observations are going to occur.”

In Responsible Data Reflection Story #7—from the Responsible Data Forum—work by HRDAG affiliates Anita Gohdes and Brian Root is cited extensively to make the point about how quantitative data are the result of numerous subjective human decisions. An excerpt: “The Human Rights Data Analysis Group are pioneering the way in collecting and analysing figures of killings in conflict in a responsible way, using multiple systems estimation.”

Wilkerson was speaking at the inaugural Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, a gathering of academics and policymakers working to make the algorithms that govern growing swaths of our lives more just. The woman who’d invited him there was Kristian Lum, the 34-year-old lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, a San Francisco-based non-profit that has spent more than two decades applying advanced statistical models to expose human rights violations around the world. For the past three years, Lum has deployed those methods to tackle an issue closer to home: the growing use of machine learning tools in America’s criminal justice system.

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.

HRDAG director of research Patrick Ball is quoted in this New York Times article about a paper that models death tolls in Gaza.

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

Eric Sears, a director at the MacArthur Foundation who leads the grantmaker’s Technology in the Public Interest program, worked at Human Rights First and Amnesty International before joining MacArthur, and has been following HRDAG’s work for years. … One of HRDAG’s strengths is the long relationships it maintains with partners around the globe. “HRDAG is notable in that it really develops deep relationships and partnerships and trust with organizations and actors in different parts of the world,” Sears said. “I think they’re unique in the sense that they don’t parachute into a situation and do a project and leave. They tend to stick with organizations and with issues over the long term, and continually help build cases around evidence and documentation to ensure that when the day comes, when accountability is possible, the facts and the evidence are there.”

“Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.

Ball told AFP the well-tested technique had been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”

“Led by the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), the process began with creating a merged dataset of “fully identified victims” to avoid double counting. Only casualties whose complete details were listed — such as their full name, date of death and the governorate they had been killed in — were included on this initial list, explained Megan Price, executive director at HRDAG. If details were missing, the victim could not be confidently cross-checked across the eight organizations’ lists, and so was excluded. This provided HRDAG and the U.N. with a minimum count of individuals whose deaths were fully documented by at least one of the different organizations. … “