Girl Geeks from around the Bay rang in the new year and broke in Palantir’s new event space with Girl Geek Dinner #32, which focused on philanthropy, technology, and the opportunities presented by both for women worldwide.

Lucy Bernholz, visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, opened the night with her thoughts on the future of philanthropy. She argued that as the quantity and quality of collected data increases, philanthropy will move from being an industry fueled by people’s passion to an industry driven by data. She urged the Girl Geeks in attendance to contribute to this shift by finding ways to share and engage data to drive change in the social sector.

Bernholz’s vision of the future is Chelsea Geyer’s reality. Geyer is a Project Developer at Resolve, which uses software donated by Palantir to understand and analyze the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the fundamentalist religious group responsible for brutal human rights violations across large parts Africa, and made infamous by the Kony 2012 video. Resolve uses data about past LRA attacks to better understand their movements and try to project who, where, and how the LRA will attack next. By analyzing the data with Palantir’s software, Geyer and Resolve are creating an ever-evolving trail of evidence that could be used if members of the LRA were ever brought to the International Criminal Court.

While there was heavy emphasis on how technology could be used for good throughout the night, Mary Quigley, a Palantir Gotham user, touched on how technology can increasingly be used for bad. At the major financial institution where she works, Quigley is responsible for preventing cyber attacks, including denial-of-service attacks, which would cripple the institution’s network if successful. Her experiences serve as a reminder to our community to continue working to improve the tools that can be used to counter bad actors and their constantly adapting tactics.

To end the night, Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID, told the Girl Geeks about how much technology has evolved in her lifetime and what that has meant for women worldwide. She also spoke about a problem that technology has so far not been able to solve: equal treatment in the workplace. O’Neill shared her own experiences with this problem. In the past she was overlooked for promotions that her male colleagues received. Just last month, she was brazenly asked to take notes at a dinner reception. O’Neill urged the women in the room to pave a path that their mothers would be proud of, and that their daughters could continue to march along.

It was a powerful end to an evening of compelling talks. The night continued with demonstrations of Palantir’s software, flip-book making, and conversations over cocktails.

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners, hosted by companies around the Bay, present chances for women in technology to meet, socialize, and learn from each other’s experiences. Palantir hosted its first Girl Geek Dinner in May 2011, which featured Linda Krieg, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. For information about the next Girl Geek Dinner, visit: http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com

Winners ($10,000 Scholarship)

Carrie Cai – MIT, MS/PhD Candidate

Carrie is currently working on her MS and PhD in Computer Science at MIT, where she is focusing on user interface design and spoken language systems. After graduating from Stanford with a BA in Human Biology and a MA in Education, she returned to school to pursue Computer Science.

Excerpt from Carrie’s Essay Submission:
“In my view, computer science has a tremendous potential to improve the lives of those facing barriers to education and language acquisition. My dream is to create software that will enable others to more easily communicate and comprehend, through developing language assistive technologies and digital interfaces for learning.”


Anna Kornfeld Simpson – Princeton, 2014
Anna is pursuing a B.S.E in Computer Science at Princeton. She is interested in information security, operating systems, networks, robotics, and getting more women excited about engineering and computer science.  Anna co-founded Princeton’s Women in Science Colloquium in 2010 to connect female students and faculty in math, science and engineering.

Excerpt from Anna’s Essay Submission:
“…when I think about the strength of the truly diverse communities I have been in, I know that those with closed minds are the minority. If I am the only woman in the room, then my friend who joins next year will not be. By reaching out to other women interested in computer science, engineering, and robotics, we can build a community that supports and inspires everyone.”

Runners Up ($7,000 Scholarship)

• Nicola Dell – University of Washington, PhD Candidate
• Aakanksha Sarda – MIT, 2014

Finalists ($2,000 Scholarship)

• Elena Frey – Stanford, 2015
• Kathryne Hawthorne – University of North Carolina, 2013
• Katie Kuksenok — University of Washington, PhD Candidate
• 
Omosola Odetunde – Stanford, 2013
• 
Pratiksha Thaker – MIT, 2014

Semi-Finalists

• Willa Chen — Princeton, 2013
• Elaine Chen — Stanford, 2013
• Bonnie Eisenman — Princeton, 2014
• Darya Filippova — Carnegie Mellon, PhD candidate
• Kirsten Koa — University of California, San Diego, 2014
• Casatrina Lee  — Stanford, 2014
• Jennifer Sleeman — University of Maryland, PhD Candidate
• Kyle Rector — University of Washington, PhD candidate
• Caitlyn Seim — Georgia Tech, 2013
• Amy Tai — Harvard, 2013

For information about next year’s scholarship, check out www.palantir.com/scholarship in the Summer of 2013!

If you’re grappling with the decision between pursuing a graduate degree or working in industry, or wondering how much gender balance in the workplace can affect work day-to-day, check out the video to hear the panelists’ thoughts and opinions.

Panelists include:

• Dana Kleinerman, Tech Writer
  Dana graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor’s degree in Math, a Master’s in Computer Science, and went on to complete a Post Baccalaureate program at The University of Pennsylvania studying advanced sciences. As a technical writer at Palantir, Dana has found a way to combine her background in Computer Science with her passion for writing.

• Danielle Kramer, Software Engineer
  Danielle earned her degree in computer science and cognitive science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she researched machine learning and served as a teaching assistant for Great Theoretical Ideas of Computer Science and Principles of Programming. She is a software engineering lead on Palantir’s Infrastructure team, which is responsible for storing, searching, scaling, and sharing the data that powers Palantir Gotham.
• Ashling Loh-Doyle, Designer
  Ashling graduated from Stanford University in 2010 with degrees in Economics and Studio Art, and found it impossible to resist the world of tech. She spent her first two years at Palantir as a graphic and product designer, and is currently building the company’s Identity team, which is responsible for internal and external communication.  
• Yael Schraeger, Product Navigator
  Yael earned her Bachelors of Science at Stanford in Symbolic Systems (with a minor in dance!), and completed her PhD at UC San Diego. She is a product management lead at Palantir, where she works with Engineering and Business Development to decide the direction of the company’s software product.

Are you a woman currently pursing a degree in a technical field? Know someone who is? Encourage her to check out Palantir’s Scholarship for Women in Tech.

A Grameen Foundation Community Knowledge worker speaks with a Ugandan farmer.

A piece recently published on both the Scientific American and Fast Company’s CoExist websites highlights our most recent work with the Grameen Foundation. We participated in Hacking for Hunger, a first-of-its-kind hackathon held by the Office of Innovation & Development Alliances at USAID, which focused on global food security issues. From the article:

Palantir took 28,000 geo-located soil samples Grameen had taken from across Uganda and combined them with data on soil types, population, income, and other factors. The developers hope the system can also help identify potential disease outbreaks, and help create an alert system for farmers who might be affected.

Read on for more about the data-driven work that Grameen Foundation is doing, pioneering the use of smartphones as two-way information conduits to rural farmers in Uganda, and how Palantir is helping with those efforts.

Grameen Foundation’s CKW Program

Video submission to the Hacking for Hunger hackathon

Grameen Foundation is the charitable organization inspired by the work of Grameen Bank, one of the first organizations to pioneer microfinancing loans for the impoverished in the developing world. The foundation grew out of the success of the bank, and is a separate entity working on lifting people out of poverty. From their website:

Grameen Foundation helps the world’s poorest, especially women, improve their lives and escape poverty by providing them with access to small loans, essential information, and viable business opportunities. Through two of the most effective tools known – small loans and the mobile phone – we work to make a real difference in the lives of those who have been left behind: poor people, especially those living on less than $1.25 per day.

A CKW – t-shirt reads, “ASK ME ABOUT FARMING.”

One of their units, the AppLab builds mobile phone applications to leverage the power of cell networks to disseminate information to those who have the least access to it. The Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) Program hires people in Uganda and provides them with Android phones running an open source, custom agricultural information app with an entire data collection platform behind it. These CKWs then travel around Uganda, engaging with rural farmers to provide them with essential information to help them be better farmers. Everything from market pricing, best practices, and disease information is included in the application, and cached for offline access when the CKW is off the grid.

The first time CKWs meet a farmer, they register him or her in their phone, record some brief demographic information (“How many children under 11 do you have?”, “Do your children have shoes? Clothes?”, “What do you use for cooking fuel?”) and start answering questions. Most of the these farmers live outside of the coverage of Ugandan cell networks, but the phones use their GPS satellite signal to record the exact time and location of each query. When the phones return to the grid, all of the data about the queries are uploaded to a central server. The upshot is a perfectly geocoded dataset that maps out a large amount of rural farming done in Uganda.

Object Explorer plot of acreage farmed vs. count of farmers (log scale)

Of all the non-profits that the Philanthropy team has engaged with, the Grameen Foundation has some of the finest data we have ever encountered. They know that their data and their two-legged sensor network have value. They are widely regarded to have the best known data on agriculture in Uganda.

Our Work with Grameen Foundation

Object Explorer plot of query distribution among categories.

Palantir’s Philanthropy added Grameen Foundation as a partner in mid-2012, having first met them at DataKind‘s San Francisco Data Dive.

One of the first workflows that we were able to uncover in their data (highlighted in the video submission) is using query data to track the outbreak of crop and livestock illness. It is possible to see the progression of blights in the query data, which was not foreseen when the CKW data set was being collected. Once the data was imported, it only took about twenty minutes to start mapping out the spread of a chicken blight.

Heatmap of baby chicken blight: Animals Chicken Local Diseases Whitish Diarrhoea In Chicks Less Than 2 Weeks Old And High Death Rate

Public presentation of our work with Grameen Foundation began earlier this year with a presentation by Philanthropy Team Lead Jason Payne to a USAID-sponsored conference on African food security as part of the G8 meeting in Chicago. Here’s a recorded version of that earlier presentation:

Next Stop: Hunger Summit

Our work in the hackathon was a success. We integrated a new dataset collected by the CKWs—the 28,000 soil samples mentioned in the article—and built up some new workflows around the data. We were one of four finalists chosen as part of the hackathon. Grameen Foundation and Palantir will be traveling with USAID to the Iowa Hunger Summit (put on by The World Food Prize Foundation) on October 16th to present our work.

Palantir donated software to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in support of a four-part investigative series on the global trade and illegal trafficking of human tissue. ICIJ broke the story at the Google Ideas Summit on Illicit Networks on July 17, 2012. The series investigates how human tissue is taken from the dead, how the tissue moves through illicit networks, and how the use of this tissue in medical procedures is affecting patient safety. In response to the stories, the World Health Organization is planning to create a coding system to better the trade of human tissue.

During the Summit, Palantir hosted a lab that showed attendees how the journalists used Palantir Gotham to help with their investigative reporting.

ICIJ investigative stories have global impact. Working with organizations like ICIJ is central to Palantir’s mission of making a difference by addressing today’s most critical challenges and empowering people to interact with their data in ways never before possible.

View the live presentation:

Additional Coverage:

NPR – Jul 17-19, 2012

Huffington Post – Jul 18, 2012

ICIJ – Jul 17, 2012

MSNBC – Jul 17, 2012

Sydney Morning Herald – Jul 16, 2012

Find out more about what we do, and how you can get involved.

TED invited Shyam Sankar, Director of Forward Deployed Engineering, to speak at TEDGlobal 2012 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Shyam used the opportunity to discuss Human-Computer Symbiosis: the idea that technology should be designed in a way that amplifies human intelligence instead of attempting to replace it. He explained the concept, which is core to the development of Palantir’s software, by using the canonical example of chess. He told the stories behind two classic encounters between man and machine: the 1997 match in which IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, and a 2005 freestyle tournament in which two amateur players using three weak laptops defeated all comers, including grandmasters armed with supercomputers. (For more on these examples, see earlier posts here, and here.)

Shyam went on to expand on the relevance and impact of Human-Computer Symbiosis today with the emergence of Big Data and related technologies. Responding quickly to victims of the Haiti earthquake, making sense of complex documents found in an Al-Qaeda house, designing the 9/11 Memorial—these are all tasks that are best tackled by a nimble mind and powerful technology working in concert.

Shyam’s visual presentation was praised as one of the best at the conference. So much so that it gained its own spot on the TED blog. Designed in-house by Collin Roe-Raymond and the Design team, the keynote was an example in its own right of human expertise and technology coming together in a beautifully stunning way.

Check out the TED blog for a full recounting of Shyam’s talk.

How long would it take you to memorize an entire deck of cards, in order?
One hour? Two hours? Three days? Would it be impossible?

On a good day, memory champ Nelson Dellis can complete the task in just 35 seconds. Under pressure, his official recorded time is 63 seconds, which was fast enough to earn his second title as US Memory Champion this year. But the striking thing about Dellis, as he revealed to a packed kitchen at Palantir Night Live on May 31 in Tysons Corner, is that he’s actually terrible at remembering things. It was when his grandmother passed away in 2009 from Alzheimer’s disease that Dellis made a commitment to exercise his brain and keep his memory alive.

This Palantir Night Live proved to be a magic show of sorts, during which the audience oohed and aahed at Dellis’ ability to recall a 49-digit number string on the fly. [See 32:49] However, Dellis is no Houdini. He spent the majority of his talk sharing the secrets behind his extraordinary memory with the intention that more people would, like him, better value their mental fitness and exercise their minds to protect it.

What’s the method behind his memory madness? Dellis has mastered the practice of translating concepts, ideas, things, people, places, numbers—anything—into visual narratives, and storing them systematically in the hard drive of his mind to ensure that he can recall them any time and any place. In order to do so, he draws on the people in his life and the places he’s been to recreate the journeys he knows best. This is actually an ancient memory technique known as Visualization and Method of Loci – or “Memory Palaces.”

First, he imagines the objects he’s memorizing (numbers, cards, to-do lists) to be images. Next, he incorporates those visuals into memories of routine journeys from the course of his life by storing each image along a different reference point on, say, his drive to work, a walk around a neighborhood park, or his path to first period in high school.

To demonstrate how his method works, Dellis mapped a journey using anchor points around the PNL stage and then instructed the audience to place visualizations on each of those points. The images were absurd, ranging from two-legged dogs hanging from the blinds to Jackie Chan playing Jenga near the easel, (See 17:00). The absurdity was intentional:

“You want to make things as silly, bizarre, violent, and sexual as possible. I’ll find myself memorizing things that are very disturbing. But, that’s the best way,” he said.

As the audience shouted out each absurd image along the path around the room, Dellis translated the images to mountain names (Two legged dog = K2, Jackie Chen playing Jenga = Kangchenjunga), and revealed that the entire group had just memorized the tallest 14 peaks in the world, in order by height.

14 peaks is one thing—but how about 52 cards? Or a 303-digit string in five minutes (another of Nelson’s US records)? Dellis has developed a complex system for number memorization, associating each pair of numbers between 00 and 99 with a person—real or fictional. He quickly stores these pairs in sets of three, crafting a sentence by translating these people into persons, actions, and objects. He then strings these individual sentences into a single larger narrative that plays out over the course of a journey through his memory palace. For a full explanation, (See 39:00)

Techniques and tricks aside, Dellis emphasized the motivation behind his memory prowess:

“Memories are really important. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose the memory of everything you’ve built in your life. I just ask that you take care of it.”

7th Palantir Government Conference

We wish to thank conference attendees for helping to make this year’s GovCon a remarkable event. With nearly a thousand attendees – most of them first-time GovCon-goers – this was a tremendous occasion to showcase our engineering developments, deployment efforts, and the exceptional work we’re contributing across a broad swath of domains.

For those of you who were able to join us, we hope you enjoyed the program. For those of you who were not able to be with us for the event, we’re posting the day’s presentations for you to enjoy at your leisure and we hope to see you at next year’s Government Conference.

Videos

It is not often that Dan Pink is preaching to the choir, or that Palantir hosts a motivational speaker. However, these rare events aligned in a compelling Palantir Night Live featuring the best-selling author and motivational speaker, who shared his thoughts on motivation in the modern workplace.

The author, who is best known for his book, Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, made the topic of his speech clear from the very beginning: he was not there to inspire the crowd with a heart-wrenching story about personal triumph.

“I am here to talk about motivation from a far nerdier perspective,” he said.

Pink’s insights gave context into why we do what we do at Palantir as he explained what makes people better workers today – a day when value isn’t measured by how many screws are turned and widgets are boxed, but by creativity and innovation instead.

Pink outlined how the traditional carrot and stick management model is a relic technology of the 19th Century, and emphasized the need for a new approach to management. He believes motivation is intrinsic and that three things – autonomy, mastery, and purpose – activate it. In other words, individuals perform better when given just a few constraints and the freedom to determine how to get the job done.

However, Pink added that autonomy is ineffective without purpose – an individual must first, and foremost, be inspired by a mission – the thing he claims, “gets people out of their beds in Gaithersburg and drive to Tysons Corner to do something amazing.”

Something amazing, according to Pink, is “giving the world something it didn’t know it needed.”

During the Q&A session following his talk, audience members probed Pink about the application of his view to government, education, and product development, and what implications it could have for all three. They asked how they could bring his school of thought to their own places of work, while facing deeply entrenched management approaches.

But, Pink was quick to correct them:

“You’re asking the wrong question,” he said. “Instead, you should be asking yourself  ‘Can I do one thing tomorrow to make my world a little better?’… And I hope that you will.”