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People filed complaints against NYPD officers, and HRDAG went above and beyond to protect the privacy of the people who reported the offenses.
Kristian Lum: “The historical over-policing of minority communities has led to a disproportionate number of crimes being recorded by the police in those locations. Historical over-policing is then passed through the algorithm to justify the over-policing of those communities.”
Upcoming Talks
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Past Talks
2015
Presentation on the research behind the Evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book Database. National Archive, Pristina, Kosovo. Patrick Ball. February 4, 2015.
How do we know what we know? Patrick Ball. Arizona State University. January, 2015.
AAAS Science & Human Rights Coalition Meeting: Big Data & Human Rights. Megan Price, panelist. Washington, D.C. January 15-16, 2015.
Examining the Crisis in Syria: Conference Hosted by New America and Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Megan Price, panelist. Washingt...
HRDAG contributes to the project by helping to classify, filter, extract, and standardize the records so that they can be useful in the database.
IPFS is a peer-to-peer storage network that promotes the resiliency, immutability, and auditability of data. This README explains code written to shepherd the files from janky external USB drives to IPFS.
Welcome to the web data resource for the International Center for Human Rights Research (Centro Internacional para Investigaciones en Derechos Humanos, or CIIDH). Here you will find raw data on human rights violations in Guatemala during the period 1960-1996. You're welcome to use it for your own statistical analyses.
ASCII delimited (csv)
Resource Information
Data Dictionary
Value Labels
File Structure (Variables)
These files are between 300-700 kilobytes. The data are stored in a zipped compression format.
For an explanation of how the data are structured and what the variables represent, see the data dictionary.
If you use ...
Help HRDAG use data science to work for justice, accountability, and human rights. We are nonpartisan and nonprofit, but we are not neutral; we are always on the side of human rights.
Cryptocurrency donations to 501(c)3 charities receive the same tax treatment as stocks. Your donation is a non-taxable event, meaning you do not owe capital gains tax on the appreciated amount and can deduct it on your taxes. This makes Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency donations one of the most tax efficient ways to support us.
We are a team of experts in machine learning, applied and mathematical statistics, computer science, demography, and social science, and ...
How we work with partners is how we relate to the whole human rights community. We work with human rights advocates and defenders to support their goals by complementing their substantive expertise with our technical expertise. To date, partners have included truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, United Nations missions, and non-governmental human rights organizations on five continents.
Here are a few stories that illustrate how we work with our partners:
HRDAG partner stories:
Quantifying Police Misconduct in Louisiana (2023)
Scraping for Pattern: Protecting Immigrant Rights in Washington State (2022)
Police Violence ...
Patrick Ball. 2015. The Bigness of Big Data: samples, models, and the facts we might find when looking at data. In The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding, ed. Philip Alston and Sarah Knuckey. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780190239497. © The Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, and Patrick Ball. 2015. Significance 12, no. 2 (April): 14–19. doi: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2015.00811.x. © 2015 The Royal Statistical Society. All rights reserved. [online abstract]
We have specified "Some Rights Reserved" on our website, instead of the more conventional "All Rights Reserved." This is because some of our web content is covered by a Creative Commons license, which means that it may be copied and even re-purposed, with some stipulations. We have made this decision because HRDAG wants to contribute to the digital commons, defined by Creative Commons as "a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law."
Our Creative Commons License
We are using the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, also known as the BY-NC-SA license. Here is ...
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.
Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Romesh Silva, Kristen Cibelli, Jana Asher, Scott Weikart, Patrick Ball, and Wendy Grossman. “Truth and Myth in Sierra Leone: An Empirical Analysis of the Conflict, 1991–2000″ (pdf). A report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the American Bar Association. March 28, 2006.
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.
During 36 years of internal armed conflict, which ended in 1996, an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared. HRDAG researchers returned to Guatemala in 2006 to analyze a sample of the estimated 46 million records discovered in the archive of the now disbanded Guatemalan National Police. HRDAG statisticians Daniel Guzmán, Romesh Silva, Patrick Ball and Tamy Guberek, together with Paul Zador and Gary Shapiro of the American Statistical Association, developed a multi-stage random sample of the archive to get a clearer picture of its contents. Sampled documents shed light on the disappearance of Guatemalan union leader Edgar Fernando ...
Excerpt:
Data scientists are programmers who ignore probability but like pretty graphs, said Patrick Ball, a statistician and human rights advocate who cofounded the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
“Data is broken,” Ball said. “Anyone who thinks they’re going to use big data to solve a problem is already on the path to fantasy land.”
