I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Ball at the HRDAG office in San Francisco for a week during summer 2016. I knew Patrick from two workshops he previously hosted at the University of Washington’s Centre for Human Rights (UWCHR). The workshops were indispensable to us at UWCHR as we worked to publish a number of datasets on human rights violations during the El Salvador Civil War. The training was all the more helpful because the HRDAG team was so familiar with the data. As part of an impressive career which took him from Ethiopia and Kosovo to Haiti and El Salvador among others, Patrick himself had worked on gathering and analysing ...
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.
We're thrilled to announce that Tarak Shah has joined our team as our new data scientist.
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 ...
But while HRDAG’s estimate relied on the painstaking efforts of human workers to carefully weed out potential duplicate records, hashing with statistical estimation proved to be faster, easier and less expensive. The researchers said hashing also had the important advantage of a sharp confidence interval: The range of error is plus or minus 1,772, or less than 1 percent of the total number of victims.
“The big win from this method is that we can quickly calculate the probable number of unique elements in a dataset with many duplicates,” said Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s director of research. “We can do a lot with this estimate.”
How might we learn what we don’t know? HRDAG associate Christine Grillo hits the wayback machine and recalls her first exposure to People Against Bad Things, ideas about bias and correlation versus causation, and truth.
For more than 10 years, and with regularity, Mexican authorities have been discovering mass graves, known as fosas clandestinas, in which hundreds of bodies and piles of bones have been found. The casualties are attributed broadly to the country’s “drug war,” although the motivations and perpetrators behind the mass murders are often unknown.
Recently, HRDAG collaborated with two partners in Mexico—Data Cívica and Programa de Derechos Humanos of the Universidad Iberoamericana—to model the probability of identifying a hidden grave in each county (municipio). The model uses an set of independent variables and data about graves from 2013 ...
In her work on statistical issues in criminal justice, Lum has studied uses of predictive policing—machine learning models to predict who will commit future crime or where it will occur. In her work, she has demonstrated that if the training data encodes historical patterns of racially disparate enforcement, predictions from software trained with this data will reinforce and—in some cases—amplify this bias. She also currently works on statistical issues related to criminal “risk assessment” models used to inform judicial decision-making. As part of this thread, she has developed statistical methods for removing sensitive information from training data, guaranteeing “fair” predictions with respect to sensitive variables such as race and gender. Lum is active in the fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAT) community and serves on the steering committee of FAT, a conference that brings together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems.
New paper in Biometrika, co-authored by HRDAG's Kristian Lum and James Johndrow: Theoretical limits of microclustering in record linkage.
Illuminating Data's Dark Side: Big data create conveniences, but we must consider who designs these tools, who benefits from them, and who is left out of the equation.
We're thinking about how rigorous analysis can fortify debates about components of our criminal justice system such as cash bail, pretrial risk assessment and fairness in general.
Kristian Lum, lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (and letter signatory), fears that “in order to flag even a small proportion of future terrorists, this tool will likely flag a huge number of people who would never go on to be terrorists,” and that “these ‘false positives’ will be real people who would never have gone on to commit criminal acts but will suffer the consequences of being flagged just the same.”
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HRDAG has published a report about the 500 Tamils who disappeared while in Army custody in Sri Lanka in 2009.
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.
Principled Data Processing is a way to prove to someone, usually yourself, that what you did was right.
Bailey joined HRDAG as a data scientist in 2022.
Valentina Rozo Ángel has worked with HRDAG and the Colombian Truth Commission to acknowledge victims of the 50-year conflict who are not visible or easily counted.
2024
18 June, 2024 - A Pulitzer for an HRDAG partner
1 March, 2024 - Citations with impact
2023
21 December, 2023 - Evaluating tools to weed out discrimination
15 December, 2023 - Connecting with partners on police accountability
7 December, 2023 - HRDAG and human rights in Colombia
24 November, 2023 - HRDAG remembers Scott Weikart
16 November, 2023 - How HRDAG helps to hold Chicago police accountable
2 November, 2023 - Building on personal relationships
19 October, 2023 - HRDAG’s role in transformative justice
25 September, 2023 - The fruit of long collaborations
28 June, 2023 - HRDAG publishes largest ...
