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Reflections: Growing and Learning in Guatemala

As a woman, mother and sociologist who is curious about the patterns of our political past in Guatemala, I feel privileged to know and work with the HRDAG team. Collaborating and learning from people like Patrick, Megan, Suzanne, Beatriz and Tamy has been an invaluable gift. I have discovered many things, both human and academic. For example, I’ve learned new ways of seeing what seemed everyday and simple, to discover that not only do the social sciences and statistics work hand in hand, but that they are critical for understanding Guatemala’s reality. Twenty years ago, on 29 December, 1996, Guatemala made history by signing the Guatemala Peace ...

HRDAG Offers New R Package – dga

Much of the work we do at HRDAG involves estimating the number of undocumented deaths using a statistical technique called multiple systems estimation (MSE, described in more detail here). One of our goals is to make this class of methods more broadly available to human rights researchers. In particular, we are finding that Bayesian approaches are extremely valuable for MSE. Accordingly, we are pleased to offer a new R package called dga (“decomposable graphs approach”) that performs Bayesian model averaging for MSE. The main function in this package implements a model created by David Madigan and Jeremy York. This model was designed to ...

Get Involved/Donate

Donating to HRDAG Thank you for your interest in making a donation to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group to help us use science to support our partners in the human rights world. You can make a donation by credit card on the Community Partners® Network for Good page. HRDAG is a "project of Community Partners," and right below  the section on payment information, you'll be able to select "Human Rights Data Analysis Group" from a drop-down menu. (On most browsers, if you use this link, HRDAG will be pre-selected on the drop-down menu.) This transaction will appear on your credit card statement as "Network for Good." If you donate by check, ...

New death toll estimated in Syrian civil war

Kevin Uhrmacher of the Washington Post prepared a graph that illustrates reported deaths over time, by number of organizations reporting the deaths. Washington Post Kevin Uhrmacher August 22, 2014 Link to story on Washington Post Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria) Back to Press Room  

Featured Video

Kristian Lum, lead statistician at HRDAG | Predictive Policing: Bias In, Bias Out | 56 mins

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 ...

Stay informed about our work

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Contact Us

You may contact us via info @ hrdag.org or use this form. Would you like to receive our newsletter? Great! Please sign up here. Find us on Mastodon Follow HRDAG on Mastodon. Employment with HRDAG Please keep in touch by signing up for our newsletters and following us on Twitter @hrdag or Mastodon. If you do not see a job listed here, please do not send your CV or résumé, as we do not file or save them, and we will only have to send you a sad “no thank you” letter. Volunteering with HRDAG Are you interested in volunteering your time to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group? We’re very flattered—but at this time we’re ...

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. FiveThirtyEight Carl Bialik August 23, 2014 Link to story on FiveThirtyEight Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria) Back to Press Room  

Big data may be reinforcing racial bias in the criminal justice system

Laurel Eckhouse (2017). Big data may be reinforcing racial bias in the criminal justice system. Washington Post. 10 February 2017. © 2017 Washington Post.

Laurel Eckhouse (2017). Big data may be reinforcing racial bias in the criminal justice system. Washington Post. 10 February 2017. © 2017 Washington Post.


Colombia

Text in English Para evaluar afirmaciones sobre la reducción de la violencia letal en Colombia En marzo de 2007, el Grupo de Análisis de Datos de Derechos Humanos (HRDAG por sus siglas en inglés) publicó un estudio con el título de "Para Evaluar Afirmaciones Sobre la Reducción de la Violencia Letal en Colombia." Los autores de dicho estudio evaluaron aseveraciones que la violencia en Colombia disminuyó tras la desmovilización de los paramilitares. Demostraron que tales afirmaciones se basan tanto en una sobreinterpretación de datos no ajustados como en inferencias causales infundadas. Los autores concluyeron que se requieren múltip...

Casanare, Colombia

Text in English [popup citation="Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Megan Price, Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball. (2010). Benetech/Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of lethal violence in Casanare."] Estimaciones de Homicidios y Desapariciones en Casanare Casanare es un departamento extenso y rural de Colombia con 19 municipios y una población de casi 300.000 habitantes. Ubicado entre las faldas de los Andes y las planicies orientales, Casanare tiene una larga historia de violencia. Diversos grupos armados han hecho presencia en Casanare, entre ellos paramilitares, guerrillas y el ejército colombiano. Muchos habitantes del Casanare han sido vícti...

State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection

Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, Herbert F. Spirer. State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection. © 1999 American Association for the Advancement of Science. [pdf – english] [pdf – español]


Truth Commissioner

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


Here’s how an AI tool may flag parents with disabilities

HRDAG contributed to work by the ACLU showing that a predictive tool used to guide responses to alleged child neglect may forever flag parents with disabilities. “These predictors have the effect of casting permanent suspicion and offer no means of recourse for families marked by these indicators,” according to the analysis from researchers at the ACLU and the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group. “They are forever seen as riskier to their children.”


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.

Skoll World Forum 2018

Illuminating Data's Dark Side: Big data create conveniences, but we must consider who designs these tools, who benefits from them, and who is left out of the equation.

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 ...

Locating Hidden Graves in Mexico

For more than 10 years, and with regularity, Mexican authorities have been discovering mass graves, known as fosas clandestinas, in which hundreds of bodies and piles of bones have been found. The casualties are attributed broadly to the country’s “drug war,” although the motivations and perpetrators behind the mass murders are often unknown. Recently, HRDAG collaborated with two partners in Mexico—Data Cívica and Programa de Derechos Humanos of the Universidad Iberoamericana—to model the probability of identifying a hidden grave in each county (municipio). The model uses an set of independent variables and data about graves from 2013 ...

Reflections: Some Stories Shape You

The first time I met anyone at HRDAG, I was a journalist. It was 2006. I was working on a story about a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon who’d collaborated with the organization on a survey in Sierra Leone, and I contacted Patrick Ball to discuss the work. At the time, I found him challenging. But I thought his work—trying to estimate how many people were killed, or, in that study, otherwise injured, during wars—was fascinating. Over the next few years, I got to know other researchers working on similar questions. In 2008, as the war in Iraq ramped up, I spoke with epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University, the World Health Organiz...

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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