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Justice Served in Guatemala: Testimonies from The National Security Archive & Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group


New Study Argues War Deaths Are Often Overestimated


Amnesty International Reports Organized Murder Of Detainees In Syrian Prison

100x100nprReports of torture and disappearances in Syria are not new. But the Amnesty International report says the magnitude and severity of abuse has “increased drastically” since 2011. Citing the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, the report says “at least 17,723 people were killed in government custody between March 2011 and December 2015, an average of 300 deaths each month.”


Why It Took So Long To Update the U.N.-Sponsored Syria Death Count

In this story, Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about the process of de-duplication, integration of databases, and machine-learning in the recent enumeration of reported casualties in Syria.
New reports of old deaths come in all the time, Ball said, making it tough to maintain a database. The duplicate-removal process means “it’s a lot like redoing the whole project each time,” he said.


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,” he says. “That’s why these amazing techniques that the industry people have are great in industry, but they don’t actually generalize to our space very well.”


How many people have died in the Syrian civil war?


United Nations Issues Report on Deaths in Syria


Unbiased algorithms can still be problematic

“Usually, the thing you’re trying to predict in a lot of these cases is something like rearrest,” Lum said. “So even if we are perfectly able to predict that, we’re still left with the problem that the human or systemic or institutional biases are generating biased arrests. And so, you still have to contextualize even your 100 percent accuracy with is the data really measuring what you think it’s measuring? Is the data itself generated by a fair process?”

HRDAG Director of Research Patrick Ball, in agreement with Lum, argued that it’s perhaps more practical to move it away from bias at the individual level and instead call it bias at the institutional or structural level. If a police department, for example, is convinced it needs to police one neighborhood more than another, it’s not as relevant if that officer is a racist individual, he said.


Guilty Verdict and 40 year Maximum Sentence in Edgar Fernando Garcia Case


Guatemala: Access to Archives Sheds Light on Case of Forced Disappearance


HRDAG To Join the Partnership on AI

HRDAG is joining Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (PAI).

Learning to Learn: Reflections on My Time at HRDAG

So much of what I learned at HRDAG was intangible, and I'm grateful to have been able to go deep.

Happy Hacking

From my first introduction to the HRDAG community at the annual retreat it was clear to me that mentorship is an organizational priority and that the contributions of interns are valued. Much of my first couple weeks as a summer intern at HRDAG were spent familiarizing myself with Patrick’s paradigm for principled data processing. At the same time, I was learning the skills and tricks (bash, make, vim, git) that promote an effortless programming workflow, a pursuit that Patrick calls “sharpening the saw” (just like in programming, you can cut down a tree with a dull blade, but your life will be much easier if you take the time to sharpen ...

Updated Casualty Count for Syria

Today the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released an HRDAG-prepared report that describes and tallies documented killings in the Syrian Arab Republic from the beginning of the conflict in March 2011 through April 2014. (The report is here.) This is our third report for the UN on the Syrian conflict, and it is an update of work we published in January 2013 and June 2013. The report, Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic, concludes that approximately 191,000 identifiable victims have been reported in the period covered (March 2011 – April 2014). (more…)

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…)

How Review of Police Data Verified Neglect of Missing Black Women

Sloppy recordkeeping by Chicago police has compromised missing persons cases. HRDAG is working with Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute to find justice for the missing.

Reflections: HRDAG Was Born in Washington

I began working with HRDAG in the summer of 2001 before it was ever even called HRDAG. In fact, not intended as a boast, I think I’m responsible for coming up with the name. After contracting with Dr. Patrick Ball for a time writing the Analyzer data management platform, I left New York City and joined him in Washington, DC, at AAAS in 2002. Soon after starting, Patrick decided to establish an identity for this new team, consisting mainly of myself, Miguel Cruz and a handful of field relationships. We discussed what to name it briefly in the AAAS Science & Policy break room, which at the time, being in the mind of unclever descriptive naming ...

HRDAG at Strata Conference 2014

Last Thursday, HRDAG co-founder and director of research Megan Price presented at Strata, the conference for data scientists and people who work with "big data." In her talk, she addressed the question of how we can know the actual number of conflict casualties in Syrian. Her short answer was, "We don't know." The longer answer was that we have a very good idea of how many conflict casualties have been reported, by several documentation groups, and that we're working on analyzing (more…)

Technical Memo for Amnesty International Report on Deaths in Detention

Megan Price, Anita Gohdes and Patrick Ball (2016). Human Rights Data Analysis Group, commissioned by Amnesty International. August 17, 2016. © 2016 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


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.

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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