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Guatemala
Collecting and Protecting Human Rights Data in Guatemala (1991-2013)
In 1996, a peace accord brokered by the United Nations ended 36 years of internal armed conflict in Guatemala. During the hostilities, non-governmental organizations asked for technical support from the scientific community in the project to gather the experiences of witnesses and victims in databases.
From 1993 to 1999 Dr. Patrick Ball, then at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), worked with the International Center for Human Rights Research in Guatemala (CIIDH) to collect and organize evidence of more than 43,000 human rights violations. The ...
Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
As an organization that uses science to advocate for human rights, the goals and issues represented by Ada Lovelace Day are very near and dear to our hearts. Additionally, we are lucky to work with and be advised by some pretty kick-ass ladies in STEM (see our People page to learn more about these amazing women (and men)).
I brainstormed a list of women I could write about, as Finding Ada suggests we celebrate today by blogging about a STEM heroine. I considered Anita Borg (she has her own institute!), who advocated tirelessly for women in computer science. I thought about Sally Wyatt, keynote speaker and organizer of the fascinating workshop...
Data Archaeology for Human Rights in Central America: HRDAG Collaborates with UWCHR
Patrick Ball is kicking himself for a decision he made almost 25 years ago. “I was clever, but I wasn’t smart,” he says ruefully, as he considers the labyrinth of tables and ASCII-encoded keystrings he used to design a database of human rights violations for the pioneering Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission (CDHES). Now I’m sitting in his office in San Francisco’s Mission District watching over his shoulder, and trying to keep up, as he bangs out code to decipher the priceless data contained in these old files. Created in 1991 and 1992, during the last days of El Salvador’s internal armed conflict, the files detail ...
How LLMs Made the Police Records Access Project Possible
When the Right to Know Act made hundreds of thousands of police records available, HRDAG joined a coalition of organizations to build a database of law enforcement records.
Tech Note on CLEAN: Teaching a small classifier to spend expensive attention wisely
The CLEAN initiative works with millions of pages of records. We could try to read everything, but the corpus is too large for human review.
Timor-Leste Op-Ed
Defending Human Rights Data And The Possibility of Justice In East Timor
By Patrick Ball and Romesh Silva
On June 5th, armed gangs broke into the offices of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in Dili, East Timor and stole their motorbikes.
Many human rights workers wondered whether the mobs would soon return to loot the irreplaceable paper records used by the CAVR to compile a definitive report on human rights abuses during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975-1999.
The release of this report was preempted by the recent violence in Dili. But in the midst of the chaos, Australian military forces stepped in to ...
HRDAG Takes a Stand Against Tyranny in the United States
by Patrick Ball and Megan Price
Today the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) publicly denounces the growing attacks on science and human rights in the United States. We reaffirm our commitment to using rigorous scientific research and data analysis to uphold accountability for perpetrators of violence—particularly when those perpetrators are in power.
For decades, HRDAG has sought accountability for those who have committed war crimes and genocide around the world. We have researched patterns of genocide, torture, disappearances, and other forms of state-sponsored violence in countries such as Guatemala, South Africa, and Haiti. We ...
Human Rights Organizations Launch Technology Freedom Cooperative to Protect Critical Data and Build Independent AI Infrastructure
The TFC will help non-profit organizations protect critical evidence, reduce dependence on big tech platforms, and build independent capacity.
Truth Commissioner
From the Guatemalan military to the South African apartheid police, code cruncher Patrick Ball singles out the perpetrators of political violence.
Watch Now: The Wandering Officer—New Databases for Police Accountability
What does justice look like for communities struggling with police violence?
For Cat Brooks, Co-Founder of the Anti-Police Terror Project (APTP), true justice isn’t possible. "There is no such thing as justice when we're talking about police terror and the stealing of our community members' lives,” Brooks said at a recent event co-hosted by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, APTP, Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), Community Law Enforcement Accountability Network (CLEAN) and the National Police Index (NPI).
Hosted at Kinfolx in Oakland, CA, the event brought together activists, scholars, and community members to discuss how new ...
Who Knows? Fact-Finding in a Failing State w/ HRDAG and Data + Society
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.
Patrick Ball on Using Statistics to Uncover Truth
“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.”
The task is a quantum of workflow
This post describes how we organize our work over ten years, twenty analysts, dozens of countries, and hundreds of projects: we start with a task. A task is a single chunk of work, a quantum of workflow. Each task is self-contained and self-documenting; I'll talk about these ideas at length below. We try to keep each task as small as possible, which makes it easy to understand what the task is doing, and how to test whether the results are correct.
In the example I'll describe here, I'm going to describe work from our Syria database matching project, which includes about 100 tasks. I'll start with the first thing we do with files we receive ...
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Over the course of a year, we mail quarterly letters and fundraising letters, as well as one or two updates as events demand. If, during the course of a fundraising campaign, you make a donation, we will do our best to remove you from the remainder of fundraising mailings that year. We may use your contact information to invite you to ...
Timor-Leste
During the violence in Timor-Leste in June 2006, armed gangs broke into the offices of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in Dili and stole their motorbikes.
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group, then at Benetech®, and other human rights observers wondered whether the mobs would soon return to loot the irreplaceable paper records used by the CAVR to compile their definitive report entitled "Chega!"
The Benetech Initiative contributed to the CAVR findings and released a separate statistical report (PDF) establishing that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of human rights violations in Timor-Leste ...