In 2018, HRDAG collaborated on work in Guatemala, US criminal justice, and more.
Laurel Eckhouse, Kristian Lum, Cynthia Conti-Cook and Julie Ciccolini (2018). Layers of Bias: A Unified Approach for Understanding Problems With Risk Assessment. Criminal Justice and Behavior. November 23, 2018. © 2018 Sage Journals. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854818811379
Laurel Eckhouse, Kristian Lum, Cynthia Conti-Cook and Julie Ciccolini (2018). Layers of Bias: A Unified Approach for Understanding Problems With Risk Assessment. Criminal Justice and Behavior. November 23, 2018. © 2018 Sage Journals. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854818811379
This post introduces the methodology of the Innocence Discovery Lab, a collaboration between IPNO and HRDAG.
The HRDAG Tech Corner is where we collect the deeper and geekier content that we create for the website. Click the accordion blocks below to reveal each of the Tech Corner entries.
Sifting Massive Datasets with Machine Learning
Principled Data Processing
Multiple Systems Estimation
What is MSE?
What do you mean by statistical inference?
What is an overlap, and how do we know when lists overlap?
How does MSE find the total number of violations?
How was MSE originally developed?
How does the Benetech Human Rights Program use MSE?
1. What is MSE?
A: Multiple Systems Estimation, or MSE, is a family of techniques for statistical inference. MSE uses the overlaps between several incomplete lists of human rights violations to determine the total number of violations.
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2. What do you mean by statistical inference?
A: ...
Trina Reynolds-Tyler's internship at HRDAG helped her use data science to find patterns in state-sanctioned violence.
<< Previous post, MSE: The Matching Process
Q10. What is stratification?
Q11. [In depth] How do HRDAG analysts approach stratification, and why is it important?
Q12. How does MSE find the total number of violations?
Q13. [In depth] What are the assumptions of two-system MSE (capture-recapture)? Why are they not necessary with three or more systems?
Q14. What statistical model(s) does HRDAG typically use to calculate MSE estimates? (more…)
A new study has estimated that over 500 Tamils were forcibly disappeared in just three days, after surrendering to the Sri Lankan army in May 2009.
The study, carried out by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the International Truth and Justice Project, based on compiled lists which identify those who were known to have surrendered, estimated that 503 people had been forcibly disappeared between the 17th– 19th of May 2009.
With so many dashboards and shiny visualizations, how can an interested non-technical reader find good science among the noise?
Today The Tor Project announced that it has elected a new Board of Directors, and among them is HRDAG executive director Megan Price. The Tor Project is a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes online privacy and provides software that helps users opt out of online tracking.
Megan and Patrick have long maintained that encryption and privacy are essential for enabling human rights work. Patrick's ideas are described in Monday's FedScoop story about encryption, human rights, and the U.S. State Department.
“Human rights groups depend on strong cryptography in order to hold governments accountable," says Patrick. "HRDAG depends on local human ...
We’ve known for years that Beka Steorts is on the cutting-edge of statistical science, and now The MIT Technology Review has realized the same. Last week she was named one of 35 Innovators Under 35, in the category of humanitarian.
We first became familiar with Beka's work in 2013 when she was a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon and was introduced to us by Prof. Steve Fienberg. Since then, we’ve felt very fortunate to collaborate with her on projects such as the UN enumeration of casualties in the Syrian conflict, and we look forward to many more years of work with her. She is one of several young stars we include in our superheroine hall ...
Violations de droits de l'homme par l'Etat tchadien sous le régime de Hissène Habré
[English]
Quels sont les principaux résultats de ce rapport?
Quelles violations de droits de l'homme commises dans les prisons de la DDS ont été prouvées?
Quelle preuve il y a t-il que Habré et la direction de la DDS étaient responsables pour ces violations de droits de l'homme?
D'où proviennent les documents internes de la DDS?
En quelle mesure l'analyse comprise dans le rapport contribue t-elle a l'affaire judiciaire Hissène Habré?
Est-ce que HRDAG donne des estimations concernant le nombre total de personnes tuées dans les prisons par la DDS - les ...
El objetivo de esta institución temporal es conocer la verdad de lo ocurrido en el marco del conflicto armado.
The summer of 2002 in Washington, DC, was steamy and hot, which is how I remember my introduction to HRDAG. I had begun working with them, while they were still at AAAS, in the late spring, learning all about their core concepts: duplicate reporting and MSE, controlled vocabularies, inter-rater reliability, data models and more. The days were long, with a second shift more often than not running late into the evening. In addition to all the learning, I also helped with matching for the Chad project – that is, identifying multiple records of the same violation – back when matching was done by hand. But it was not long after I arrived in Washington ...
HRDAG associate William Isaac is quoted in this article about how predictive policing algorithms such as PredPol exacerbate the problem of racial bias in policing.
I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.
Solving for X documents Patrick's team as they travel to Guatemala, Kosovo, and Liberia, helping human rights supporters apply sophisticated computer analysis to human rights events.
“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.
