Palantir Advises More Abstraction for Less Frustration
June 10, 2014
At this year’s Gigaom Structure Data conference, Palantir’s Ari Gesher offered an apt parallel for the data field’s current growing pains: using computers before the dawn of operating systems. Gigaom summarizes his explanation in, “Palantir: Big Data Needs to Get Even More Abstract(ions).” Writer Tom Krazit tells us:
“Gesher took attendees on a bit of a computer history lesson, recalling how computers once required their users to manually reconfigure the machine each time they wanted to run a new program. This took a fair amount of time and effort: ‘if you wanted to use a computer to solve a problem, most of the effort went into organizing the pieces of hardware instead of doing what you wanted to do.’
“Operating systems brought abstraction, or a way to separate the busy work from the higher-level duties assigned to the computer. This is the foundation of modern computing, but it’s not widely used in the practice of data science.
“In other words, the current state of data science is like ‘yak shaving,’ a techie meme for a situation in which a bunch of tedious tasks that appear pointless actually solve a greater problem. ‘We need operating system abstractions for data problems,’ Gesher said.”
An operating system for data analysis? That’s one way to look at it, I suppose. The article invites us to click through to a video of the session, but as of this writing it is not functioning. Perhaps they will heed the request of one commenter and fix it soon.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Palantir focuses on improving the methods their customers use to analyze data. The company was founded in 2004 by some folks from PayPal and from Stanford University. The write-up makes a point of noting that Palantir is “notoriously secretive” and that part(s) of the U.S. government can be found among its clients. I’m not exactly sure, though, how that ties into Gesher’s observations. Does Krazit suspect it is the federal government calling for better organization and a simplified user experience? Now, that would be interesting.
Cynthia Murrell, June 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
