Blogs

Preventing and Detecting Fraud, Waste and Abuse using Palantir Government and RDC

Having trouble watching this video? Click here to download in Windows Media format (.wmv). This video demonstrates how open source data from Regulatory Data Corp can be used inside Palantir to find fraud, waste and abuse. In the video we use RDC data alongside federal contract data from USASpending.gov to find suspicious contracts. We find: [...]

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Investing in Cheap, Efficient Companies

In this blog post we explore a strategy that buys cheap companies with high return on assets. To measure the performance of this strategy we created an Index of such stocks and rebalanced it yearly, investing equally among the chosen stocks. In quantitative terms, the stocks we picked at each rebalance satisfied the following criteria: [...]

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Profiling Somali Piracy

Analysis of Piracy Around the Horn of Africa The recent hostage rescue by US Navy SEALs off the coast of Somalia has focused media attention on the growing threat of piracy to international shipping in the Horn of Africa. We have applied our advanced analysis capabilities to data published by the International Maritime Bureau Piracy [...]

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Model-View-Adapter

I used to think I understood MVC. In undergraduate CS programs, MVC is taught as an off-the-shelf pattern, explained once and then ready for use in the real world. Wikipedia also makes it seem pretty simple: Model–View–Controller (MVC) is an architectural pattern used in software engineering. Successful use of the pattern isolates business logic from [...]

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Can Changes in Implied Volatility Predict Changes in Trading Volume?

Today, we examine whether we can anticipate trading volume based on changes in implied volatility. We are going to utilize a relatively new piece of the Palantir platform, Scatterplot. My first task was putting a little meat behind the question and defining what we would call a change in implied volatility. I decided to employ [...]

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The Secret History of Silicon Valley

When Palantir Technologies was founded, we thought we were doing something particularly unique for Silicon Valley—embarking on a labor of love, solving hard technical problems, supporting the national security of our nation. It turns out that we are actually standing on the shoulders of heroes—of giants so prolific that they are the ones that not [...]

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West Nile Virus Infections in the US 1999-2007

Since 1999, the Centers for Disease Control have published reports for West Nile Virus. Using data through 2007, Palantir has plotted the westward expansion of infections using our Map Application and Palantir Heatmap Helper. The cyclical nature of West Nile and the temporal jumps in the disease pop-out as we discover the local hotspots and [...]

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Congo

With the recent arrest of General Laurent Nkunda, one of the key rebel leaders fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we decided to take a look at an ongoing conflict that has involved armies from across Africa and defied numerous attempts to establish a lasting peace. Our analysis focuses on the complex relationships of [...]

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