Palantir Technologies

VAST 2010 Challenge
Grand Challenge: Arms Dealing and Pandemic

Authors and Affiliations:

Palantir Technologies – VAST10 Team
Brandon Wright, Palantir Technologies, bwright@palantirtech.com

Jesse Rickard, Palantir Technologies

Alex Polit, Palantir Technologies

Jason Payne, Palantir Technologies

Tool(s):

Palantir is a platform for collaborative, all-source analysis and operations, enabling geospatial, social-network, temporal, statistical, and structured and unstructured analysis. Palantir provides flexible tools to import and model data, intuitive constructs to search against this data, and powerful techniques to iteratively define and test hypotheses. Our platform is most highly valued for:

Quick integration of Enterprise data sources.
Simple, intuitive search and discovery.
Extensibility.
Open and interoperable with other toolkits.
Collaboration.

Palantir Horizon is part of Palantir’s approach for big data: rapid, interactive analysis of datasets that contain billions of records. Project Horizon was developed as a Palantir “Hack Day” project on top of the Palantir platform; it empowers analysts to start with their entire ecosystem of data (literally billions of rows of data), and iteratively pare the data down to discover the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Horizon

Leverages in-memory data storage to achieve 100,000 times the speed and 400 time the performance per dollar versus disk
Scales linearly to trillions of records using commodity hardware
Enables analysis through an innovative user interface that visually represents branching analysis pathways
Works with any structured or normalized dataset

We also used the NIH Basic Local Alignment Search Tool.

Video:

GC.wmv

ANSWERS:

GC: Investigate any possible linkage between the illegal arms dealing and the pandemic outbreak.

In particular, you need to address the following:

1. Briefly describe your hypothesized linkage between the arms dealing activity and the pandemic outbreak.

2. Where did the disease originate (as far as you can tell with the data)? Provide a time-based tracing of its spread among countries. If you have established linkages between arms dealers in certain countries and the pandemic, please indicate this.

3. We had countries with arms dealers identified in MC 1 that did not suffer pandemic outbreaks in MC 2. Provide a hypothesis as to why some countries that may have been involved with arms dealers did not suffer an outbreak?

Illegal Arms Network Contributes to Spread of Drafa Virus Pandemic

Key Judgments

· We judge with high confidence infected individuals involved in international arms trafficking unintentionally spread the Drafa virus through a series of meetings with people who then returned to the outbreak countries.

· We judge with high confidence that the Drafa virus outbreak originated from a strain native to Nigeria but have limited evidence to explain how the virus may have initially been brought to Dubai.

Analysis

Drafa Virus Spread via Dubai Meeting Among Arms Traffickers

The Drafa pandemic probably was spread when two infected arms trafficking ringleaders met with individuals from all of the outbreak countries between 15 to 22 April. We judge that known Russian arms trafficker Mikhail Dombrovski, who was infected with the Drafa virus, unintentionally spread the virus to Ukrainian trafficker Nicolai Kuryakin. Dombrovski and Kuryakin probably then spread the disease through meetings with traffickers from at least nine countries over the following days.

· Dombrovski likely met with Kuryakin and Yemeni trafficker Saleh Ahmed on 19 April, according to signals intelligence, at which time Kuryakin and Ahmed probably contracted the virus. Ahmed died at Aden General Hospital in Yemen on 1 May, according to a foreign intelligence service, probably of the Drafa virus.

· Dombrovski probably met with and infected illegal arms traffickers from Yemen, Columbia, and Venezuela through meetings between 18 and 23 April, according to a body of intelligence.

· Kuryakin probably met with and infected illegal arms traffickers from Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, Kenya, Iran, and Iran through meetings between 17 and 21 April, according to a body of intelligence. He also met with Turkish and Thai traffickers, but likely before he was carrying the virus.

· Kuryakin was removed from a flight from Paris to Moscow and later died in a Paris hospital of symptoms attributed to the Drafa virus, according to an Interpol report.

Pandemic Originated in Nigeria

The recent Drafa virus pandemic probably originated in Nigeria. Comparisons of the genetic sequences of the 58 outbreak strains collected from patients during the outbreak with the ten known native strains of the virus indicate that a Nigerian strain is the most genetically similar and therefore the most likely origin of the outbreak based on our understanding of the nature of the Drafa virus.

· The mutations in the genetic sequences of the 58 outbreak sequences are 98 to 99 percent similar to the Nigeria_b native strain, according to analysis of the strains using a National Institute of Health tool.

· The other nine outbreak strains ranged from only 90 to 97 percent similar to the outbreak sequences. The average similarity of these strains to the outbreak sequences was approximately 94 percent.

A Nigerian man possibly carrying the Drafa virus may have traveled to Dubai and infected Dombrovski in Dubai just prior to his meetings with the other arms traffickers. Dombrovski in mid-February confirmed a 15 April meeting with a Nigerian business partner, expressing his desire that health issues in Nigeria not be allowed to disrupt the planned meeting, according to signals intelligence. We have no further reporting on the nature of the February health issues in Nigeria or the current health status of the Nigerian.

· Dombrovski and the Nigerian man in early January agreed to meet in Dubai for business at an unspecified date, according to signals intelligence, The Nigerian was having Dombrovski assist in withdrawing $30m and was going pay him a 10% commission in order to launder money and purchase weapons?

· They had been in correspondence about probably illegal business activities since as early as September 2009, according to a body of signals intelligence.

Pandemic Spreads to Arms Traffickers Home Countries, But Thailand and Turkey Unaffected

The Drafa virus pandemic’s spread to nine countries associated with the arms traffickers who met in Dubai suggests they returned to their home countries immediately following the meetings. We have no reporting to corroborate this assertion.

Pandemic death records from Thailand and Turkey show no deaths attributed to the Drafa virus pandemic, probably because the arms traffickers from Turkey and Thailand who met in Dubai were not infected. Our analysis of death records from the pandemic countries suggests that pandemic related deaths occurred eight days after initial hospitalizations with patients reporting a set of certain symptoms. Turkey and Thailand had no statistically significant deaths that matched the pandemic’s timing and symptom characteristics.

· A Thai arms trafficker in mid-January confirmed that he would meet with Kuryakin on 17 April, according to signals intelligence, which was before the date Kuryakin contracted the Drafa virus.

· Kuryakin met with several arms traffickers in Dubai. He met with some on 17 April, before he contracted the virus, and met others after 18 April, once he became a carrier.

Methodology

Our analysis involved the use of three analytic tools. We used Palantir, an intelligence analysis software platform, to model relationships and track events and associations among arms traffickers.

We had access to approximately 15 million hospitalization records and 350,000 associated death record that we analyzed to understand the nature of the Drafa virus spread. Palantir Horizon, an advanced analysis and visualization tool for very large structured data sets, enabled us to quickly analyze and visualize the data.

Finally, we used the National Institute of Health’s Web-based Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) to analyze the gene sequences of the native and outbreak sequences of the Drafa virus. We then integrated the BLAST output into Palantir for analysis and visualization.