246 results for search: www.xn--299aqd11rg1lb34as7a.net/feed/patrickball
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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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 ...
Timor-Leste FAQs
How do you know that there are more conflict-related deaths than have been reported to the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR, by its Portuguese acronym)?
Where did the method of multiple systems estimation come from?
If you didn't have access to the whole population, how do you know how representative these data are of the entire population? i.e. How do you control for bias?
What are the total conflict-related mortality numbers? How many people were killed and disappeared between 1974 and 1999? And how many people died due to hunger and illness?
What is the margin of error associated with these results?
What is ...
Datasets available for research
Over the last few years, we've tried to make the data organized in our projects publicly accessible. We have encouraged our partners to publish the data at the completion of the project. We continue to believe it is important to offer access to the data used in our projects for the sake of transparency as well as to encourage further research and analysis. However, we are increasingly concerned about how raw data are used. Data collected by what we can observe is what statisticians call a convenience sample, which is subject to selection bias.
We're keeping these datasets available for researchers who want to use them for simulation or estimation ...
Transitional Justice in Syria: Accountability and Reconciliation Conference
I spent last weekend in Istanbul at an excellent conference organized by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies (SCPSS). The conference included numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Syria as well as international human rights researchers and advocates. Families of victims told their stories, data collection groups discussed the challenges, and need, to document violations, transitional justice experts worried about infrastructure such as the police force and judicial system, and local leaders pledged to work together for peace.
I was invited to speak about HRDAG's recent report examining killings in Syria documented by ...