Biotechniques published an interview with Patrick Ball, inspired by his John Maddox Prize award.

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group, an independent scientific human rights organization based in San Francisco, has counted at least 17,723 people killed in Syrian custody from 2011 to 2015 — around 300 every week — almost certainly a vast undercount, it says.

According to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, at least 17,723 people were killed in government custody from the start of the uprising in March 2011 to December 2015 – an average of 300 deaths each month. There are no figures for subsequent years but there is no reason to believe the killings stopped.

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group employs AI to analyze data from conflict zones, identifying patterns of human rights abuses that might be overlooked. This assists international organizations in holding perpetrators accountable.

HRDAG is mentioned in the “child welfare (sometimes called “family policing”)” section: At least 72,000 low-income children are exposed to AI-related decision-making through government child welfare agencies’ use of AI to determine if they are likely to be neglected. As a result, these children experience heightened risk of being separated from their parents and placed in foster care.

“Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.

Ball told AFP the well-tested technique has been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”

“Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.

Ball told AFP the well-tested technique had been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”

Patrick Ball, director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and a statistician who has conducted similar estimates of violent deaths in conflicts in other regions, said the study was strong and well reasoned. But he cautioned that the authors may have underestimated the amount of uncertainty caused by the ongoing conflict.

The authors used different variations of mathematical models in their calculations, but Dr. Ball said that rather than presenting a single figure — 64,260 deaths — as the estimate, it may have been more appropriate to present the number of deaths as a range from 47,457 to 88,332 deaths, a span that encompasses all of the estimates produced by modeling the overlap among the three lists.

“It’s really hard to do this kind of thing in the middle of a conflict,” Dr. Ball said. “It takes time, and it takes access. I think you could say the range is larger, and that would be plausible.”

Eric Sears, a director at the MacArthur Foundation who leads the grantmaker’s Technology in the Public Interest program, worked at Human Rights First and Amnesty International before joining MacArthur, and has been following HRDAG’s work for years. … One of HRDAG’s strengths is the long relationships it maintains with partners around the globe. “HRDAG is notable in that it really develops deep relationships and partnerships and trust with organizations and actors in different parts of the world,” Sears said. “I think they’re unique in the sense that they don’t parachute into a situation and do a project and leave. They tend to stick with organizations and with issues over the long term, and continually help build cases around evidence and documentation to ensure that when the day comes, when accountability is possible, the facts and the evidence are there.”

Justin Hendrix, the CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press, a nonprofit media venture concerned with the intersection of technology and democracy, interviewed two podcast guests: HRDAG’s director of research, Patrick Ball, and Maheen Khan, director of technology at the Invisible Institute. His August 30, 2026 podcast interview with Patrick and Maheen explored how the new Technology Freedom Cooperative can help nonprofit organizations protect evidence, reduce their dependence on big tech platforms, and build capacity.

In a 29 June, 2026 segment of MS Now, Maddow talks with Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer, authors of “On Courage: How to be a dissident in an age of fear,” about how to live as an American during a time of authoritarianism. The book, On Courage, quotes Patrick Ball, whom Maddow refers to as “a human rights statistician who has spent his whole career cataloguing perpetrators of state violence.”

“They’re one of the most important NGOs that no one’s ever heard of. … What they do is very rigorous statistical extrapolations of information that’s not in the record, about wars, civil wars, coups, oppressive states, and they’re used for truth and reconciliation, human rights tribunals, war crimes trials. … They’ve worked on every high-profile war crimes trial in the century.”

“You look at all the huge problems in the world, and you are trying to find ways to plug in. And it turns out—whether it is cooking a meal for somebody who’s hungry or cleaning some data so that you can do analysis on the things that we actually need to do to advance our work to make the world a little bit better— the main thing they require is somebody to care enough to do it.”

How do scientists and statisticians stand up to authoritarianism, especially when it happens in their home countries? That was the topic tackled by the Computer Says Maybe podcast, featuring HRDAG’s Executive Director Megan Price, Data and Society’s Janet Haven and Charlton McIlwan, and podcast host Alix Dunn.

“The story of missing data is what I’ve spent my whole career thinking about,” explained Patrick. “The joke in our team is if the data were perfect, lawyers would do this with excel.”