Palantir is an intense place to work. There are people here around the clock (since developers set their own schedules) and folks and equipment arriving and leaving all the time. We’re a very focused bunch, trying to change the world as fast as we can by creating a whole new class of tools.

However, we’re not just people who build software; we’re sons and daughters, mothers and fathers and citizens of our community. As we headed into the holidays, Palantir employees decided to give something back: we signed up with a local organization call The Family Giving Tree, a now national charity that started as an MBA project out of San Jose State University.

The Family Giving Tree is unique in that it allows children to request the presents that they want. In this way, rather than putting money into a black box of a charity, you purchase the gift itself and donate that.

The people of Palantir Technologies purchased over 100 gifts, fulfilling the holiday wishes of the children that asked for them as well as cash donations that will buy gifts for at least 40 more.

The pile of presents collected by Palantir employees for The Family Giving Tree.

Happy Holidays, everyone! We’ll be back next year with more technical articles and information about Palantir.

As we mentioned in an earlier post, Palantir was recently invited to the IEEE’s VisWeek in Dayton Ohio, and was honored to be invited to participate in the VAST Interactive Challenge as part of VisWeek.

After winning an award for Interactive Visual Analytic Environment, Palantir was one of three teams selected to participate in the interactive session from 73 VAST Challenge entries. For the challenge, we were given a completely new set of data to analyze. We had 30 minutes to import 3 disparate datasets into Palantir, 30 minutes to train an analyst that had never used Palantir, and then 2 hours for the analyst to explore the data.

The data for the challenge came from three different sources, with a set of questions to answer for each set of data. There was an infectious outbreak, a Wikipedia edit war, and an abduction from a city park. Over the three challenges, there were over 100,000 datapoints to analyze. All of the data revolved around a fictitious town in Florida, Barracuda Springs, and was linked to the fictitious cult that was the center of the 2008 VAST Challenge. While two members of our team were importing the three datasets, the third team member was working with our analyst (each of the three teams was given a analyst from a nearby analytical organization). In 30 minutes, our analyst was able to learn how to conduct relational, temporal, geospatial, and statistical analysis in Palantir. After the 30 minutes of training, she was able to easily navigate the Palantir workspace, and solve all three challenges. Below is her work (hit the link to check it out).

Her conclusion was that Palantir was “viciously good software” and that she would be asking her boss if they could acquire Palantir for their work. Hit the link below to see screenshots and explanations for one of the challenge workflows.

We really enjoyed the VAST Challenge, and our experience at VisWeek. There were a lot of outstanding papers, posters, and speakers at VisWeek, and we were inspired by many fantastic visualizations that might soon make their way into Palantir’s Finance and Government Platforms. We are also looking forward to the 2009 VAST Challenge!
Read the rest of this entry »