STAT@UVM Colloquium Series: Patrick Ball

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Join the STAT@UVM colloquium series for talks connecting statistics, data science, and applications across disciplines.

Digital Echoes: Understanding Patterns of Mass Violence with Data and Statistics

with Patrick Ball Human Rights Data Analysis Group

ABSTRACT: Data about mass violence can seem to offer insights into patterns: is violence getting better, or worse, over time? Is violence directed more against men or women? But in human rights data collection, we (usually) don’t know what we don’t know – and worse, what we don’t know is likely to be systematically different from what we do know. If we try to interpret raw data, selection bias determines our findings. Statistical patterns in data tend to reflect how the data were collected rather than changes in the real-world phenomena data purport to represent.

Using analysis of killings in Iraq 2005-2010, homicides committed by police in the US 2005-2011, and analysis of genocide in Guatemala in 1982-1983, this talk will discuss the use of capture-recapture methods to estimate of total patterns of violence, where the estimates correct for heterogeneous underreporting. We’ll discuss how biases in raw data can, in some cases, be mitigated through estimation. The examples will be grounded in their use in public debates and in expert testimony in criminal trials for genocide and war crimes. The talk will conclude with an introduction to the methods and analysis used by the transitional justice mechanisms in Colombia—the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and the Truth Commission. I’ll describe the data used by the Truth Commission for their quantitative conclusions. We have published the data, along with tools and examples (in R packages) so the data can be analyzed correctly.

BIO: Patrick Ball has spent thirty years doing quantitative analysis for truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, international criminal tribunals, and United Nations missions. His work has been conducted in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, South Africa, Chad, Sri Lanka, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Liberia, Perú, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syria.

Patrick began working in the human rights field in El Salvador in 1991. From 1993 to 2003, he worked in several capacities in the Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he began recruiting colleagues to build HRDAG. While working on human rights cases in Guatemala during the late 1990s, Patrick worked with partners to adopt strong cryptography to protect witnesses. From 2003 to 2013, he was Vice President for Human Rights Programs and the Chief Scientific Officer at Benetech, a nonprofit technology company in Silicon Valley. While at Benetech, he helped to develop Martus, a free, open-source software application that allows users anywhere in the world to securely gather and organize information about human rights violations. From 2013 through 2015, Patrick was Executive Director of HRDAG; on December 1, 2015, he became HRDAG’s Director of Research.