HRDAG’s funding comes from private, international donors: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundations, an anonymous U.S.-based private foundation, Ford Foundation, The National Endowment for Democracy and individual donors. This funding supports both specific projects, as well as our scientific work generally in human rights data analysis.
For the entirety of its existence, HRDAG has been a project of non-profit organizations, first at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and then at Benetech, a non-profit Silicon Valley technology company. In February 2013, HRDAG became ...
Una investigación de Dejusticia y Human Rights Data Analysis Group asegura que en Colombia hay un subregistro de los asesinatos de líderes sociales que se han perpetrado en Colombia. Al analizar las diferentes cifras de homicidios que han publicado diversas organizaciones desde 2016, se llegó a la conclusión que la problemática es mayor de lo que se cree.
Kilómetro Cero is making a comparison of police killings in Puerto Rico and police killings in the non-territorial United States, and HRDAG is helping to organize the data.
2021 Rafto Prize Videos
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HRDAG’s core values all have a connection to Scott Weikart, 1951–2023.
2025
24 August 2025 - Structural Zero 03: Without Encryption, My Work Wouldn’t Be Possible
17 July 2025 - Structural Zero 02: Scatter and keep working
3 June 2025 - Structural Zero 01: Dictatorships create a lot of data
24 June, 2025 - Breaking through the noise with evidence
19 May 2025 - Structural Zero 00: Introducing Structural Zero
20 March, 2025 - Focus on HRDAG’s US-based projects
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We recently learned about an article by Dr Nafeez Ahmed that criticizes the methods and conclusions of the Iraq Body Count (IBC) and the work of Professor Michael Spagat. Dr Ahmed cites our work extensively in support of his arguments, so we think it’s useful for us to reply.
We welcome Dr Ahmed’s summary of various points of scientific debate about mortality due to violence, specifically in Iraq and Colombia. We think these are very important questions for the analysis of data about violent conflict, and indeed, about data analysis more generally. We appreciate his exploration of the technical nuances of this difficult field.
Unfortunately, ...
I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.
This week, we join our friends and colleagues in feeling horrified by the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we have for the past 26 years, we stand with the victims of violence and support human rights and dignity for all. We spend our careers observing and documenting mass political violence across the world. The demands by the so-called “alt-right” to normalize racism and social exclusion are all too familiar to us.
At HRDAG, our work is always guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). We reaffirm our commitment to these principles, in particular that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and ...
The modular nature of the workflow and use of Git allowed us to work on different parts of the project from across the country.
Algorithmic tools like PredPol were supposed to reduce bias. But HRDAG has found that racial bias is baked into the data used to train the tools.
Tools like Compas allegedly help judges predict future criminal activities and eliminate bias. HRDAG and partners showed how the tools recycle bias.
Identifiers being sequential could make possible estimations of the population of detained children.
In July 2009, The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) concluded a three-year project with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help clarify Liberia's violent history and hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable for their actions. (This work was conducted by HRDAG while with Benetech.)
In the course of this work, HRDAG analyzed more than 17,000 victim and witness statements collected by the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and compiled the data into a report entitled "Descriptive Statistics From Statements to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission." The report is included as an annex to the final ...
We aim to produce code that is clear, replicatable across machines and operating systems, and that leaves an easy-to-follow audit trail.
It could make sense to use Rust as a data journalist for in-browser computations, and other thoughts from RustConf.
The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.
Herb led and mentored a generation of statisticians working in human rights.
“If you’re not careful, you risk automating the exact same biases these programs are supposed to eliminate,” says Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the San Francisco-based, non-profit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). Last year, Lum and a co-author showed that PredPol, a program for police departments that predicts hotspots where future crime might occur, could potentially get stuck in a feedback loop of over-policing majority black and brown neighbourhoods. The program was “learning” from previous crime reports. For Samuel Sinyangwe, a justice activist and policy researcher, this kind of approach is “especially nefarious” because police can say: “We’re not being biased, we’re just doing what the math tells us.” And the public perception might be that the algorithms are impartial.