“The model uses obvious predictor variables, Ball says, such as whether or not a drug lab has been busted in that county, or if the county borders the United States, or the ocean, but also includes less-obvious predictor variables such as the percentage of the county that is mountainous, the presence of highways, and the academic results of primary and secondary school students in the county.”

In the last three days of the Sri Lankan civil war, as thousands of people surrendered to government authorities, hundreds of people were put on buses driven by Army officers. Many were never seen again.

In a report released today (see here), the International Truth and Justice Project for Sri Lanka and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group showed that over 500 people were disappeared on only three days — 17, 18, and 19 May.

Ball, a statistician, has spent the last two decades finding ways to make the silence speak. He helped pioneer the use of formal statistical modeling, and, later, machine learning—tools more often used for e-commerce or digital marketing—to measure human rights violations that weren’t recorded. In Guatemala, his analysis helped convict former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt of genocide in 2013. It was the first time a former head of state was found guilty of the crime in his own country.

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.”

Wilkerson was speaking at the inaugural Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, a gathering of academics and policymakers working to make the algorithms that govern growing swaths of our lives more just. The woman who’d invited him there was Kristian Lum, the 34-year-old lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, a San Francisco-based non-profit that has spent more than two decades applying advanced statistical models to expose human rights violations around the world. For the past three years, Lum has deployed those methods to tackle an issue closer to home: the growing use of machine learning tools in America’s criminal justice system.

Patrick Ball es un sabueso de la verdad. Ese deseo de descubrir lo que otros quieren ocultar lo ha llevado a desarrollar fórmulas matemáticas para detectar desaparecidos.

Su trabajo consiste en aplicar métodos de medición científica para comprobar violaciones masivas de derechos humanos.

From the article: “Based on Ball’s calculations, using our data, nearly 3,000 people could have been killed in the three areas we analyzed in the first 18 months of the drug war. That is more than three times the official police count.”

From the article: “Price described the touchstone of her organization as being a tension between how truth is simultaneously discovered and obscured. HRDAG is at the intersection of this tension; they are consistently participating in science’s progressive uncovering of what is true, but they are accustomed to working in spaces where this truth is denied. Of the many responsibilities HRDAG holds in its work is that of “speaking truth to power,” said Price, “and if that’s what you’re doing, you have to know that your truth stands up to adversarial environments.”

Guatemala is still plagued by urban crime, but it is peaceful now compared to the decades of bloody civil war that convulsed the small Central American country. As he arrives in the capital, Guatemala City, FRONTLINE/World reporter Clark Boyd recalls, “When the fighting ended in the 1990s, many here wanted to move on, burying the secrets of the war along with hundreds of thousands of the dead and disappeared. But then, in July 2005, the past thundered back.”

International human rights work attracts activists and lawyers, diplomats and retired politicians. One of the most admired figures in the field, however, is a ponytailed statistics guru from Silicon Valley named Patrick Ball, who has spent nearly two decades fashioning a career for himself at the intersection of mathematics and murder. You could call him a forensic humanitarian.