This new report by the United Nations Office of High Commissioner of Human Rights builds on three prior analyses and new statistical analysis by HRDAG on killings in Syria.
225 results for search: fizojiku.blogspot.com/feed/rss2/fritzscheuren
Courts and police departments are turning to AI to reduce bias, but some argue it’ll make the problem worse
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.”
Assassinations of social leaders in Colombia in 2016–2017
Patrick Ball, César Rodríguez and Valentina Rozo (2018). Asesinatos de líderes sociales en Colombia en 2016–2017: una estimación del universo. Dejusticia and Human Rights Data Analysis Group. August 2018. © 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
Patrick Ball, César Rodríguez and Valentina Rozo (2018). Asesinatos de líderes sociales en Colombia en 2016–2017: una estimación del universo. Dejusticia and Human Rights Data Analysis Group. August 2018. © 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
Guatemala’s Bol de la Cruz Found Guilty
Today Guatemala’s former national police chief Colonel Héctor Rafael Bol de la Cruz was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the 1984 kidnapping and disappearance of 27-year-old student union leader Fernando Garcia, who was last seen when officers detained him outside his home. Along with Bol de la Cruz, former senior police officer Jorge Gomez was also tried; he received a sentence of 40 years in prison. That verdict comes in part because of testimony this month by HRDAG’s Patrick Ball, who served as an expert witness and presented data analysis done with colleague Daniel Guzmán to assess the flow of thousands of ...
Killings of Social Movement Leaders in Colombia
Using multiple system estimation, we estimate the total population of social movement leaders killed in Colombia during 2018.
Covid-19 Research and Resources
HRDAG is identifying and interpreting the best science we can find to shed light on the global crisis brought on by the novel coronavirus, about which we still know so little. Right now, most of the data on the virus SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, the condition caused by the virus, are incomplete and unrepresentative, which means that there is a great deal of uncertainty. But making sense of imperfect datasets is what we do. HRDAG is contributing to a better understanding with explainers, essays, and original research, and we are highlighting trustworthy resources for those who want to dig deeper.
Papers and articles by HRDAG
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Film: Solving for X
Solving for X documents Patrick's team as they travel to Guatemala, Kosovo, and Liberia, helping human rights supporters apply sophisticated computer analysis to human rights events.
Lessons at HRDAG: Making More Syrian Records Usable
If we could glean key missing information from those fields, we would be able to use more records.
HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2020
In 2020, HRDAG provided clarity on issues related to the pandemic, police misconduct, and more.
Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies
This Harvard Data Science Review article uses the least unreliable source of pandemic data: reported deaths.
String matching for governorate information in unstructured text
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Lies, Damned Lies and Official Statistics
This essay in the Health and Human Rights Journal addresses attempts to undermine Covid-19 data collection.
HRDAG Welcomes New Staff, Interns and Fellow
HRDAG is delighted to announce five additions to our team: one new staff member, three summer interns, and one fellow.
Lessons at HRDAG: Holding Public Institutions Accountable
Principled Data Processing is a way to prove to someone, usually yourself, that what you did was right.
Quantifying Police Misconduct in Louisiana
HRDAG contributes to the project by helping to classify, filter, extract, and standardize the records so that they can be useful in the database.
Newsletters
2026
19 March 2026 - HRDAG’s police accountability event
11 February 2026 - Structural Zero 08: Yes, Your Dataset is Probably Biased
2025
18 December, 2025 - Community and collaboration
10 December, 2025 - Standing against authoritarianism on Human Rights Day
10 December, 2025 - Structural Zero 07: All of the ways we remember: How data scientists hold memory with and for survivors
25 November, 2025 - Structural Zero 06: The Data are Clear: Public Engagement Improves AI Science
14 November, 2025 - Analyzing Chicago's missing person cases
21 October, 2025 - HRDAG takes a stand against tyranny
9 October, 2025 - ...
How Review of Police Data Verified Neglect of Missing Black Women
Sloppy recordkeeping by Chicago police has compromised missing persons cases. HRDAG is working with Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute to shed light on these stories.
Evaluating gunshot detection technology
Bailey’s analysis stemmed from data we had access to as part of our ongoing collaboration with the Invisible Institute.
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 ...
Without Encryption, My Work Wouldn’t Be Possible
Structural Zero Issue 03
August 24, 2025
Part Three of Our Three-Part “Gathering the Data” Series. Read part one and part two.
In computer security, “security” is always relative to something. What are we actually defending against, and how are we doing it? This is our “threat model.”
My colleagues and I have been using scientific tools to analyze evidence of human rights abuses, including using statistics to uncover mass graves in Mexico and analyzing under-reported police homicides in the United States.
Our work isn’t always popular. It can infuriate those in power who want to cover up incriminating truths about the ...