Public data & human rights

Abstract: For the last 30 years, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) has been using statistics and data science to support human rights advocacy campaigns around the world. While our international work typically involves casualty counts and using advanced statistical techniques to estimate undocumented victims, our U.S. work often involves using public data to report human rights violations experienced by those who are still living. Now, the California Racial Justice Act of 2020 has opened up even more opportunities for us to contribute to campaigns for racial justice, particularly for those affected by racial bias in criminal legal proceedings. Since early 2024, HRDAG has been collaborating with public defenders to provide support for RJA claims for their clients. This led to our first time providing expert testimony in a U.S. courtroom in February 2025, when we presented and defended 3 simple statistics based on the District Attorney's case data and county census data. Bailey will discuss the model HRDAG uses for obtaining and analyzing public data to address local human rights concerns, as well as their experience working on an RJA case.

Mathematics

Audience: general audience

Comments: Bio: Bailey Passmore has been a data scientist at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (“HRDAG”) since January 2022. While at HRDAG, they have designed reproducible and transparent data processing streams that include a variety of tasks, such as scraping data from public transparency platforms, extracting structured data from unstructured document collections, extracting key information from text data using LLMs, database deduplication and entity resolution, version resolution, and producing statistical analyses that speak to patterns of racial bias. Prior to their position at HRDAG, Bailey worked as an undergraduate Data Science and Research Consultant for the San Diego Supercomputer Center, where they mined, cleaned, and analyzed system performance data and prepared the findings for the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) conferences. Bailey graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a bachelor of science degree in Cognitive Science, after transferring with a background in Mathematics and Computer Science.

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NYU CDS Math and Democracy Seminar

Series comments: The Math and Democracy Seminar features research on contact points between the mathematical sciences and the structure of democratic society. The purpose of the seminar is to stimulate mathematical activity on problems relating to democracy, and to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between mathematicians and other scholars and democratic stakeholders.

Examples of topics of interest include detection of gerrymandering, fairness and accountability of algorithms used in social decision-making, voting and apportionment theory, applications of statistics to discrimination law and the census, and mathematical modeling of democratic processes. The scope is not limited to these and is expected to expand as further applications emerge.

Seminars currently conducted via Zoom (with some events also in person). Look for links in individual talk descriptions.

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