Tech Corner
The HRDAG Tech Corner is where we collect the deeper and geekier content that we create for the website. You can browse by Category or scroll to view find all articles listed.
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October 31, 2016
Training with HRDAG: Rules for Organizing Data and More
I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Ball at the HRDAG office in San Francisco for a week during summer 2016. I knew Patrick from two workshops he previously hosted at the University of Washington’s Centre for Human Rights ...more -
October 30, 2016
Using MSE to Estimate Unobserved Events
At HRDAG, we worry about what we don't know. Specifically, we worry about how we can use statistical techniques to estimate homicides that are not observed by human rights groups. Based on what we've seen studying many conflicts over ...more -
July 28, 2016
Clustering and Solving the Right Problem
In our database deduplication work, we’re trying to figure out which records refer to the same person, and which other records refer to different people. We write software that looks at tens of millions of pairs of records. We ...more -
June 14, 2016
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 ...more -
January 8, 2016
A geeky deep-dive: database deduplication to identify victims of human rights violations
In our work, we merge many databases to figure out how many people have been killed in violent conflict. Merging is a lot harder than you might think. Many of the database records refer to the same people--the records are duplicated. We ...more
