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Podcast: Dr. Patrick Ball on Using Statistics to Uncover Truth

Dr. Patrick Ball recently visited the Plutopia News Network podcast for a wide-ranging, inspiring conversation about his work for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Patrick spoke about how he first discovered human rights work during his time in El Salvador with the Peace Brigades International.  That led to his ongoing work as a statistician and computer programmer working to assess and analyze human rights violations. He also unpacked some common statistical techniques used by researchers at Human Rights Data Analysis Group, such as multiple systems estimation, which uses multiple different datasets to gain insights into the data we don't ...

In Solidarity

We stand with our partners and every organizer fighting for justice.

Verdad al acecho (The Truth Is Stalking)


How Do We Know the Death Toll in Syria Is Accurate?


Big Data Predictive Analytics Comes to Academic and Nonprofit Institutions to Fuel Innovation

“Revolution Analytics will allow HRDAG to handle bigger data sets and leverage the power of R to accomplish this goal and uncover the truth.” Director of Research Megan Price is quoted


The World According to Artificial Intelligence (Part 2)

The World According to Artificial Intelligence – The Bias in the Machine (Part 2)

Artificial intelligence might be a technological revolution unlike any other, transforming our homes, our work, our lives; but for many – the poor, minority groups, the people deemed to be expendable – their picture remains the same.

Patrick Ball is interviewed: “The question should be, Who bears the cost when a system is wrong?”


Transitional Justice in Syria: Accountability and Reconciliation Conference

I spent last weekend in Istanbul at an excellent conference organized by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies (SCPSS). The conference included numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Syria as well as international human rights researchers and advocates. Families of victims told their stories, data collection groups discussed the challenges, and need, to document violations, transitional justice experts worried about infrastructure such as the police force and judicial system, and local leaders pledged to work together for peace. I was invited to speak about HRDAG's recent report examining killings in Syria documented by ...

Rapid response: Civilian deaths from weapons used in the Syrian conflict

Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, Jay D. Aronson, and Christopher McNaboe. 2015. BMJ (29 September): 351. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h4736. © The BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. All rights reserved. Open access.


The story of one document inside the AHPN

The beginnings are crucial in every step—as critical as the beginning of sound, life, hope, and justice. Here are some first steps from the AHPN (Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional). This is the story of Oficio Number COC/207-laov, a document that at first appears uninteresting. But this is not just any oficio*. This is one of the many documents that helped bring to trial the people responsible for the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García. A father, husband, son, and student, García was, like many people today, interested in changing his community for the better. (more…)

How We Choose Projects

For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been carving out a niche in the international human rights movement. We know what we’re good at and what we’re not qualified to do. We know what quantitative questions we think are important for the community, and we know what we like to do. These preferences guide us as we consider whether to take on a project. We’re scientists, so our priorities will come as no surprise. We like to stick to science (not ideology), avoid advocacy, answer quantifiable questions, and increase our scientific understanding. While we have no hard-and-fast rules about what projects to take on, we organize our deliberation ...

How a Data Tool Tracks Police Misconduct and Wandering Officers

Some police officers avoid accountability by “wandering” to another agency. HRDAG and partners created a data tool that tracks officers’ employment history.

Tech Note – using LLMs for structured info extraction

This post introduces the methodology of the Innocence Discovery Lab, a collaboration between IPNO and HRDAG.

Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India: A Preliminary Quantitative Analysis

Romesh Silva, Jasmine Marwaha and Jeff Klingner. “Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India: A Preliminary Quantitative Analysis,” A Joint Report by Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group & Ensaaf, Inc. January, 2009.


Machine learning is being used to uncover the mass graves of Mexico’s missing

“Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s Director of Research and the statistician behind the code, explained that the Random Forest classifier was able to predict with 100% accuracy which counties that would go on to have mass graves found in them in 2014 by using the model against data from 2013. The model also predicted the counties that did not have mass hidden graves found in them, but that show a high likelihood of the possibility. This prediction aspect of the model is the part that holds the most potential for future research.”


PredPol amplifies racially biased policing

100x100-micHRDAG associate William Isaac is quoted in this article about how predictive policing algorithms such as PredPol exacerbate the problem of racial bias in policing.


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.”


Outreach at Toronto TamilFest for Counting the Dead

Michelle spent a weekend in Toronto, Canada, reaching out to the community at TamilFest, where she and a colleague invited people to sit down and talk.

Counting the Dead in Sri Lanka

ITJP and HRDAG are urging groups inside and outside Sri Lanka to share existing casualty lists.

La importancia de la estadística

Patrick Ball (2018). La importancia de la estadística. Ibero. La revista de la universidad Iberoamericana. August-September 2018. © 2018 Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México. Pp. 50-51.

Patrick Ball (2018). La importancia de la estadística. Ibero. La revista de la universidad Iberoamericana. August-September 2018. © 2018 Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México. Pp. 50-51.


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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