HRDAG is joining Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (PAI).
Trina Reynolds-Tyler is HRDAG's 2019 Human Rights Intern.
Structural Zero Issue 02
July 17, 2025
Part Two of Our Three Part “Gathering the Data” Series. Read part one.
As a statistician, I spend most of my days working at a computer.
Because I work with data about human rights violations, I go to places where I can document evidence of crimes—like disappearances, killings, and torture. So while I may just be working at a computer, those computers can be in places where there is still the potential for violence to emerge.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about how to work in countries emerging from conflict. Those lessons seem especially applicable today, ...
HRDAG is pleased to accept donations to our nonprofit via Donor Advised Funds. We’ve published step-by-step directions to make donating through a DAF simple and fast. Check out the directions now or contact us at info@hrdag.org if you have any questions.
October 9 is Donor Advised Fund Day—a recently established awareness day that encourages DAF holders to activate their funds by recommending charities to receive support. You can participate by donating to HRDAG via a Donor Advised Fund or read on to learn more.
What is a Donor Advised Fund?
A Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) is an easy, flexible way to support charities while taking advantage of ...
There may have been more undocumented World War II-era Korean "comfort women" than known.
Patrick Ball, Sheila Coronel, Mariel Padilla and David Mora (2019). Drug-related killings in the Philippines. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 July 2019. © HRDAG 2019.
Patrick Ball, Sheila Coronel, Mariel Padilla and David Mora (2019). Drug-related killings in the Philippines. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 July 2019. © HRDAG 2019.
How we work with partners is how we relate to the whole human rights community. We work with human rights advocates and defenders to support their goals by complementing their substantive expertise with our technical expertise. To date, partners have included truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, United Nations missions, and non-governmental human rights organizations on five continents.
Here are a few stories that illustrate how we work with our partners:
HRDAG partner stories:
Quantifying Police Misconduct in Louisiana (2023)
Scraping for Pattern: Protecting Immigrant Rights in Washington State (2022)
Police Violence ...
Violence against women in all its forms is a human rights violation. Most of our HRDAG colleagues are women, and for us, unfortunately, recent campaigns such as #metoo are unsurprising.
Causal inference methods show that for indigent clients, money bail increases their likelihood of a guilty conviction.
Boston Police deployed SWAT teams disproportionately to Black neighborhoods, sometimes raiding homes with young children. HRDAG extracted data revealing just how disproportionate.
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.
Trina Reynolds-Tyler's internship at HRDAG helped her use data science to find patterns in state-sanctioned violence.
In this free, downloadable report, Mike Barlow of O’Reilly Media cites several examples of how data and the work of data scientists have made a measurable impact on organizations such as DataKind, a group that connects socially minded data scientists with organizations working to address critical humanitarian issues. HRDAG—and executive director Megan Price—is one of the first organizations whose work is mentioned.
Using multiple system estimation, we estimate the total population of social movement leaders killed in Colombia during 2018.
How do police officer booking decisions affect pre-trial risk assessment tools relied upon by judges?
How do police officer booking decisions affect tools relied upon by judges?
Our newest Data Science Fellow, Will Taylor, is currently a doctoral student in political science and public policy at the University of Michigan.
2021 Rafto Prize Videos
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“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. … “
The datasets contributed by 30+ organizations do a wonderful job of tallying the violence that was observed—but they don’t account for the violence that nobody witnessed or documented.