In this video, Trina Reynolds-Tyler of Invisible Institute talks about her work with HRDAG on the missing persons project in Chicago and Beneath the Surface.

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group employs AI to analyze data from conflict zones, identifying patterns of human rights abuses that might be overlooked. This assists international organizations in holding perpetrators accountable.

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

Tarak Shah is quoted with regard to the National Police Index: “Police often avoid accountability by moving to another agency rather than face discipline. This tool, allowing anyone to look up and track the histories of such officers, provides an invaluable service for the human rights community in our fight against impunity.”

NPR Illinois has covered the new National Police Index, created by HRDAG’s Tarak Shah, Ayyub Ibrahim of Innocence Project, and Sam Stecklow of Invisible Institute.

Biotechniques published an interview with Patrick Ball, inspired by his John Maddox Prize award.

HRDAG is mentioned in the “child welfare (sometimes called “family policing”)” section: At least 72,000 low-income children are exposed to AI-related decision-making through government child welfare agencies’ use of AI to determine if they are likely to be neglected. As a result, these children experience heightened risk of being separated from their parents and placed in foster care.

“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. … “

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.”

“In January, Invisible Institute released the data on a tool called the National Police Index, which houses data from over two dozen of POST’s peer agencies around the country. Developed by Invisible Institute, Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and Innocence & Justice Louisiana, the NPI seeks employment history data from state POST agencies to track, among other questions, the issue of so-called “wandering cops” who move from department to department after committing misconduct.” Read the article.

“Every kind of classification system – human or machine – has several kinds of errors it might make,” [Patrick Ball] says. “To frame that in a machine learning context, what kind of error do we want the machine to make?” HRDAG’s work on predictive policing shows that “predictive policing” finds patterns in police records, not patterns in occurrence of crime.

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.