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Protecting the Privacy of Whistle-Blowers: The Staten Island Files

HRDAG built a machine-learning tool to strip the raw data of any potentially identifying information such as names and court case numbers. There was no "acceptable error rate."

Celebrating Ten Years of Data from the AHPN

Ten years ago, in July 2005, human rights officers stumbled upon a nondescript warehouse in a commercial zone of Guatemala City and changed history. They had discovered an archive–its existence kept secret–belonging to the Guatemalan National Police, whose officers committed human rights atrocities on behalf of the government during the civil war. Inside the building was the bureaucratic detritus typical of a large government agency: 80 million pages detailing shifts worked, tasks assigned, assignments fulfilled, workers’ whereabouts, and who was supervising whom. The documents, which were found stacked on dirty floors, shoved into bags, ...

Karl E. Peace Award Recognizes Work of Patrick Ball

The American Statistical Association’s 2018 Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society recently recognized the work of leading human rights mathematician Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). The award is presented annually to statisticians whose exemplary statistical research is matched by the impact their work has had on the lives of people.

Established by the family of Karl E. Peace in honor of his work for the good of society, the award—announced at the Joint Statistical Meetings—is bestowed upon distinguished individual(s) who have made substantial contributions to the statistical profession, contributions that have led in direct ways to improving the human condition. Recipients will have demonstrated through their accomplishments their commitment to service for the greater good.”

This year, Ball became the 10th recipient of the award. Read more …

Letter from Alejandro Valencia Villa

Alejandro Valencia Villa is a Former Commissioner of the Colombian Truth Commission. (Letter in English, and letter in Spanish.) Introduction One of the most obvious and most difficult questions to answer when analyzing an armed conflict is determining the number of victims. In a conflict like Colombia’s, prolonged and with complex characteristics due to the different nature of the armed actors and because they committed a great variety and quantity of human rights violations and breaches of humanitarian law, the challenge is even greater. As if this were not enough, Colombia also had a large number of records of these violations and infract...

Epidemiology has theories. We should study them.

With so many dashboards and shiny visualizations, how can an interested non-technical reader find good science among the noise?

Remembering Scott Weikart

HRDAG’s core values all have a connection to Scott Weikart, 1951–2023.

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 ...

500 Tamils disappeared in Army custody — New Study

The Sri Lankan army must explain to the families of the disappeared and missing what happened to an estimated 500 Tamils who disappeared in their custody at the war end on/around 18 May 2009, said two international NGOs who have been collating and analysing lists of names.

Sri Lanka has one of the largest numbers in the world of enforced disappearances but these 500 represent the largest number of disappearances all in one place and time in the country. For a detailed account of the process of estimating the 500 please see: “How many people disappeared on 17-19 May 2009 in Sri Lanka?” .

Always Learning

The data science field is always changing, which means that I'll always be learning.

Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY).

Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovic, and Jana Asher. Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY). © 2002 American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative. [full text]

Reflections: The People Who Make the Data

HRDAG associate Miguel Cruz has an epiphany. All those data he’s drowning in? Each datapoint is a personal tragedy, a story both dark and urgent, and he’s privileged to have access.

Liberia 2009 – Coding Testimony to Determine Accountability for War Crimes

In July 2009, HRDAG concluded a three-year project with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to help clarify Liberia’s violent history and hold perpetrators accountable. A military coup in 1979 sparked 24 years of civil war in Liberia where warring factions subjected civilians to severe human rights abuses. The TRC sought to determine whether these violations represented a systematic pattern or policy. This chapter describes how HRDAG developed a statistical analysis of the more than 17,000 victim and witness statements collected by the TRC and applied Ball’s “Who Did What To Whom?” methodology. HRDAG scientist Kristen ...

FAT* Conference 2018

Kristian Lum spoke about "Understanding the Context and Consequences of Pre-Trial Detention" at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*).

Learning a Modular, Auditable and Reproducible Workflow

The modular nature of the workflow and use of Git allowed us to work on different parts of the project from across the country.

Layers of Bias: A Unified Approach for Understanding Problems With Risk Assessment

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

The World According to Artificial Intelligence (Part 1)

The World According to Artificial Intelligence: Targeted by Algorithm (Part 1)

The Big Picture: The World According to AI explores how artificial intelligence is being used today, and what it means to those on its receiving end.

Patrick Ball is interviewed: “Machine learning is pretty good at finding elements out of a huge pool of non-elements… But we’ll get a lot of false positives along the way.”

Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992)

Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball (2019). Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992). Demographic Research, 1 October 2019. © 2019 Demographic Research. DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27  

Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball (2019). Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992). Demographic Research, 1 October 2019. © 2019 Demographic Research. DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27

Donate with a Donor Advised Fund

To donate to Human Rights Data Analysis Group via a Donor Advised Fund, you should follow three steps: In your Donor Advised Fund portal, look up our fiscal sponsor Community Partners using the Tax ID 95-4302067. It is important to use the tax ID, not the name, as there are many organizations with the same or similar names. Once you have selected Community Partners, look for a way to customize the donation or donate to a specific project that allows you to write-in the name of a fund or project. Then please write in "Human Rights Data Analysis Group." Please email info@hrdag.org to let us know that you have sent the donation so we can make ...

Data Collection and Documentation for Truth-Seeking and Accountability

Megan Price and Patrick Ball (2014). The Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre. © 2014 SJAC.Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

Core Concepts

Inaccurate statistics can damage the credibility of human rights claims—and that's why we strive to ensure that statistics about human rights violations are generated with as much rigor and are as scientifically accurate as possible. But, what are the pitfalls leading to inaccuracy—when, where, and how do data become compromised? How are patterns biased by having only partial data? And what are the best scientific methods for collecting, managing, processing and analyzing data? Here are the data pitfalls that HRDAG has identified, as well as some of our approaches for meeting these challenges. We believe that human rights researchers must take ...

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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