TEDGlobal 2013 guest curators Nassim Assefi and Gabriella Gomez-Mont share how they created the session, “The World on Its Head,” which will make you rethink the global order.

Session 6 of TEDGlobal 2013 has a captivating title: “The World on its Head.” Guest curated by Nassim Assefi and Gabriella Gómez-Mont — both from the inaugural class of TEDGlobal 2009 Fellows — the session will be a chance to turn our conceptions of the Middle East and Latin America upside down, and to rethink staid assumptions about politics, religion, art, architecture, peacemaking and more. 

Here, the TED Blog asks Assefi and Gómez-Mont to share what inspired the session and how they went about picking speakers.

Where did the theme “The World on Its Head” come from?

Nassim Assefi: Gabriella and I brainstormed, trying to tie together our two regions. What is the zeigeist in each of our regions? The undercurrents? What do they have in common? How have they been underestimated? Misunderstood? What is their hidden potential? We settled on “The World On Its Head” after viewing a wonderful map of the world with the South facing upward. That visual became a metaphor for rethinking deeply held assumptions and views of the world and sitting with the discomfort of a new idea until the brain adjusts.

Gabriella Gómez-Mont: For me, the idea of “The World on Its Head” rings strongly and intimately with moments in life when I had to truly rethink important things so deeply that the former map no longer works, no longer matches the new reality. That moment, pause, gap, chaos of no longer understanding anything because one fundamental part of understanding crumbles — it’s one of the most enigmatic and profoundly human moments one can go through.

It is both so strangely beautiful and tremendously brutal to rethink once unshakable truths. No wonder all of us, collectively and individually, try to make the world sit still and force maps to remain the same for centuries even when they no longer work. But in the end, that moment of confusion is a fundamental part of every transformation, adventure, and reconstitution — a pure turbulent threshold between paradigms. And then many new possibilities surface after finding one’s footing again in an upside-down world.

How did the guest curation come about?

Assefi: I had been pitching speaker ideas to [TEDGlobal curator] Bruno Giussani since the moment I met him, and many of those suggestions have made it to the TED stage. I play that role at TEDMED, too. In August 2012, we received a marvelous email invitation out of the blue from Bruno to guest curate/host a session at TEDGlobal. There are more than 300 TED Fellows from around the world, each doing amazing work, and no TED Fellow had ever guest curated a session at TED, so this is an incredible honor.

Gabriella and I were chosen in part because we work in, and come from, distinct regions of the world — I represent the Middle East/Central Asia, and Gabriella Latin America. I’m an internist and global women’s health specialist (most recently tackling maternal mortality in Afghanistan). I also write novels, work on civic peace-oriented projects in the Middle East, defend human rights from a medical angle, and am a feminist activist, a single mom, and a diehard TEDhead. Gabriella is an artist, a documentary filmmaker, a curator for the arts in Latin America, and now head of a civic think tank/laboratory for Mexico City.

I represent the sciences/health, literature, and global politics; she is the arts expert, the design/architecture person, a cultural force. We have different styles of working, but in reality, we overlap quite a bit. I speak Spanish and have worked in Central America. She has traveled in the Middle East. We’re both polyglots, crazy dancers, and global citizens, though we have strong predilections for our regions of origin.

What’s the thrust of the session?

Assefi: It’s about discarding assumptions about the Middle East, Latin America, and the way you think the world works in exchange for groundbreaking ideas that will hopefully inspire you to rethink politics, religion, art, peacemaking, the role of sports, underestimated economies and architecture, and even toxic environments.

Gómez-Mont: Exactly, that is a great description. I was interested in reformulating and rethinking certain gray areas we take for granted, and I wanted to focus on Latin America, on certain places and subjects that could be explored more thoroughly. We sought to make our speakers complement each other, understand how we could weave certain threads among individual narratives, regions and diverse disciplines. And diversity — of age, country of origin, religion, and so on — was important to us.

Can you describe your speakers?

Assefi: All are global citizens/multicultural. Each of them has taken on courageous work. The lineup include: architect and urbanist Teddy Cruz; explorer, writer and filmmaker Holly Morris; economic policy innovator Juan Pardinas; historian/political scientist Trita Parsi; performance artist Tania Bruguera; accidental theologist Lesley Hazleton; and founder of the Beirut Marathon, May El-Khalil.

We found our musician through two other TEDFellows, Meklit Hadero and Esra’a al Shafei. Dina el Wedidi is one of Meklit’s Nile Music artists and is featured in Esra’a’s MidEastTunes app. Through the Rolex Mentor and Protegee Arts Program, Dina has been paired with the famous Brazilian musician, Gilberto Gil. Dina seemed like a poetic fit for our session — the TED Fellow-link to discovering this brazen, beautiful, young woman singer-songwriter from the Middle East, who found her audience during the Arab Spring and is being influenced and mentored by a legendary Latin American musical force.

But we don’t want to give away our speakers’ topics. It’s more fun if you are surprised by our session. At a TED conference, one generally doesn’t know what each speaker’s idea worth spreading will be until show time!

Which speakers do you think are going to knock our socks off? Why?

Assefi: That’s a cruel question, like asking a mother to choose the favorite between her children! The truth is, if curated well, different speakers will wow different people. It depends on what’s happening in your life, what you’ve been thinking about lately, and how open you are to certain ideas. Of the four I’ve chosen, I can imagine each one of them blowing you away. I predict Gabriella feels the same.

Gómez-Mont: I feel the same. And one never knows until that fateful day when the crowd goes silent and the curtain goes up what will happen in that space between those words on paper and the voice on stage — between the careful planning and the happily reckless, often serendipitous, many times shifting, sometimes accomplice or sometimes trickster — reality.

TED Global, themed “Think Again,” kicks off on June 10 in Edinburgh, Scotland. See the full list of speakers, and get lots more information about attending at the conference website. And stay tuned to the TED Blog where we will be bringing you live coverage of the conference.

Zahra' Langhi: Why Libya's revolution didn't work -- and what might

Activist Zahra’ Langhi was part of the “day of rage” that eventually led to Gaddafi’s toppling. But the cost was high — a six month war in which almost 50,000 people lost their lives. In today’s powerful talk, Langhi turns her eye to the incredible task of rebuilding the country.

“Gaddafi left behind a heavy burden — a legacy of tyranny and corruption. For four decades, Gaddafi’s tyrannical regime destroyed the infrastructure, as well as the culture and moral fabric, of Libyan society,” says Langhi. “I was keen — along with many other women — to rebuild Libyan civil society, calling for an inclusive and just transition to democracy.”

To that end, Langhi co-founded the Libyan Women’s Platform for Peace (LWPP), a group lobbying for women to be included as the Libyan government was reformed. In this talk, Langhi explains the “zipper list,” an initiative the group championed which called for political parties to alternate male and female candidates, weaving both genders onto their ballots. At first, this worked remarkably well.

“However, bit by bit, the euphoria of the elections — and of the revolution as a whole — was fading out, for every day we were waking up to the news of violence,” says Langhi. “Our society, shaped by a revolutionary mindset, became more polarized and driven away from the ideas and principles — freedom, dignity, social justice — that we first held. Intolerance, exclusion and revenge became the post-math of the revolution.”

Today, Langhi questions whether “rage” was the right path out of dictatorship. In this talk, she posits that perhaps what her country needed more than quantitative representation of women in government was the qualitative representation of traditionally feminine values like compassion, mercy and consensus building. To hear Langhi’s important thoughts on what needs to happen after a revolution, watch her talk.

Here, more TED Talks about revolution in the Middle East.

Wael Ghonim: Inside the Egyptian revolutionWael Ghonim: Inside the Egyptian revolution Google executive Wael Ghonim helped galvanize Egypt’s revolution by creating a Facebook page memorializing a man who was tortured by Mubarak’s regime. Still, he says, in the Egyptian revolution, no one was a hero — because everyone was a hero. In this talk from TEDxCairo, Wael Ghonim tells the story of the first two months of the revolution — a story we now know is still in progress.

Bahia Shehab: A thousand times noBahia Shehab: A thousand times no In Arabic, there is a phrase: “No, and a thousand times no.”  As revolution spread through Egypt, art historian Bahia Shehab took up her stencil and proclaimed “a thousand times no” to dictators, to military rule, to violence against women. In this brave talk from TEDGlobal 2012, Shehab shares her previously anonymous work with the world.

Srdja Popovic: How to topple a dictatorSrdja Popovic: How to topple a dictator Why was 2011 such a pivotal year for people-powered revolutions? In this talk from TEDxKrakow, Srdja Popovic — himself a part of the movement that toppled Milosevic in 2000 — looks at why these revolutions gained so much footing. He outlines the skills and tactics needed to oust a dictator. Most surprising: a sense of humor.

Wadah Khanfar: A historic moment in the Arab worldWadah Khanfar: A historic moment in the Arab world The former head of Al Jazeera, Wadah Khanfar has a unique perspective on the Arab Spring. “Change was imposed on us and people rejected that because they thought it was alien to the culture,” he says in this Talk from TED2011.  “Always, we believed, change should spring from within.” Here, Khanfar speaks with great optimism about revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and beyond.

Dalia Mogahed: The attitudes that sparked Arab SpringDalia Mogahed: The attitudes that sparked the Arab Spring It’s the opposite of what one would expect: as Egypt grew in wealth, its people’s satisfaction plummeted. This was what Dalia Mogahed, the director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, saw even before the Arab Spring. In this talk from TEDxSummit, she shares some of the grievances she saw in survey data — which sprung not out of distrust of the West, but admiration.

Israeli graphic designer Ronny Edry has always loved posting images on Facebook, most of them garnering just a few random likes from his friends. But on March 15, he posted an image that got a different kind of reaction. The image showed him holding his young daughter, an Israeli flag in her hand. In comic book-style bubbles, the text on the poster reads, “Iranians, we will never bomb your country. We [heart] you.”

As Edry explains in today’s talk, filmed at TEDxJaffa, Israel and Iran have been on the brink of war for years. Still, he was shocked at how quickly his message of love made its way around the internet. “Later on in the night, I woke up and went by the computer and I see all these red dots on Facebook. I see many people talking to me, most of them I don’t know,” says Edry. “A few of them were from Iran. In Israel, we don’t talk to people from Iran.”

Messages from other Israelis poured in, requesting that the same poster be made with their image on it. Meanwhile, heartfelt emails from Iran poured in.

“Iranians started to respond with their own posters. They have graphic designers. What? That’s crazy,” jokes Edry. “They’re shy, they don’t want to show their faces, but they want to spread the message. They want to say the same thing. Now it’s communication. It’s a two-way story. It’s Israeli and Iranian sending the same message to each other. We are two people who are supposed to be enemies.”

Soon, CNN picked up Edry’s campaign.

“When you see the Middle East, it is only bad news,” says Edry. “Suddenly there was something happening that was good news … We’re showing a new reality.”

Edry’s poster gave rise to the Facebook groups “Israel Loves Iran” and “Iran Loves Israel.” Similar pages were also created for “Palestine Loves Israel” and “Israel Loves Palestine.” Others embroiled in conflicts across the globe picked up the idea too.

To hear more of the amazing reactions to Edry’s online campaign, watch his talk. Below, see more of the posters, as well as photos of other actions designed to diffuse tensions in Israel through imagery.

Edry’s graphic designer friends set up a shop to create posters for fellow Israelis. Here, a sampling.

Here, some of the images created by Iranians.

Above, images from Edry’s latest — and perhaps bolder — campaign, called “Not ready.”

Edry’s work reminds us a lot of TED Prize winner JR’s “Face to Face,” which he calls “the largest illegal photography exhibition ever.”

In 2007, JR and collaborator Marco shot stunning — and often funny — black and white portraits of Israelis and Palestinians who do the same jobs. Their oversized images mingled together, pasted on the walls that separate Israel from Palestine. JR says that the project came about when he and Marco traveled to the region, examining why the two cultures cannot get along.

“These people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families,” reads the project website. “A religious covered woman has her twin sister on the other side. A farmer, a taxi driver, a teacher, has his twin brother in front of him. And he is endlessly fighting with him.”

The exhibit aimed to give a face to the other side.

In 2011, JR established Inside Out, a global art project that allows anyone around the world to upload images and get large poster-sized print-outs for actions with a social purpose. With Inside Out, JR once again headed to Israel, spending two weeks traveling through Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem with a giant photobooth in a mobile truck. Participants stepped into the truck and took portraits. Then, they were able to paste up their posters instantly. Again, the idea of this project — called  “Time is Now, Yalla!” — was to personalize the conflict.

In the port city of Haifa, another initiative brings people together through art. Beit Hagefen, Haifa’s Arab-Jewish Cultural Center, kicked off the Coexistence Walk during their “Festival of Festivals” — a tradition begun in 1993 when Ramadan, Christmas and Hannukah overlapped. Each year (the tradition continues even if the holidays do not coincide), different artists from diverse backgrounds come together over a common theme and use the streets and buildings as canvasses. The idea: to foster unity. Some of these artists come from families with one Jewish and one Arab parent, so these efforts for peace are especially meaningful.

The Festival of Festival attracts 200,000 people annually,  75% of them visitors to the city. This event has become a pinnacle of multiculturalism in the region. The executive director of Beit Hagefen tells The Jerusalem Post, “It’s easier to bring people together around art and culture and not debates.”

These initiatives also remind us of how , in 2005, street artist Banksy made a splash when he headed to the West Bank Barrier. There, he created nine paintings — one showing a window with a scenic mountain in the background and another showing a white horse peaking its head through the wall.

TIME Editor-at-Large Bobby Ghosh covers global affairs and the Middle East. For five years he served as the magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief and, by the end of his tenure, was the longest serving print journalist in Iraq. Most recently Ghosh wrote a cover story on Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, arguably the most important man in the Middle East at this moment.

In his informative TED Talk on why global jihad is losing, Ghosh discusses how Osama bin Laden misappropriated the word “jihad” — not just for the West but also for Arabs in the Middle East. While he painted it as a violent global holy war, in Islam the term has long referred to the internal, personal struggle to be a better person. Ghosh asserts that with the end of bin Laden came the end of this brand of bin Ladenism. And along with it, the concept of the global jihad.

Ghosh’s ideas are fascinating, but also raise a lot of questions. I caught up with him recently by email to hear more.

Do the Western media and/or government have a vested interest in perpetuating fear mongering in the form of jihadi rhetoric? What does the Western media get wrong about bin Ladenism and jihad?

No, I don’t believe Western media or governments have an interest in perpetuating fear about jihad. They misunderstand the word, but that’s not deliberate. They come by their misunderstanding honestly! The problem, as I say in my talk, is that extremists in the Muslim world have appropriated the word and twisted its meaning — so much so that many Muslims are now unsure what jihad stands for. So it would be unfair to blame Westerners for having the same uncertainty. There are some individuals in the West, just as there are in the East, who play up the worst interpretations, but they are a micro-minority.

How close do you think bin Ladenism is to being over? To what extent is jihad totally local?

I feel that the cult of bin Laden is on its last legs. Much of what passes for violent “jihad” today — whether it’s in Afghanistan, or Mali, or Somalia or Iraq — is, when you look closely, a contest for power and resources in those countries. The people behind the violence sometimes use the rhetoric of global jihad, and claim to be following in bin Laden’s footsteps, but in reality their interests are much narrower than his.

You say at the end of your talk that the original meaning of “jihad” can be reclaimed by Muslims who want peace. Can you elaborate on how this can be done? What does that mean on the ground-level? How do you wage a war on a word?

You don’t wage war on a word, you stand up to those who have hijacked it. Across the Muslim world, governments, civil-society organizations and religious groups are doing exactly that. Governments use policing and counterterror strategies to target extremist groups, but the challenge for civil-society and religious groups is to remind the faithful of the word’s original meaning. This is being done through education, through activism and through preaching in mosques and on TV. It’s an uphill struggle: corrupting a concept is easier than redeeming it.

One thing to note: extremists are actually helping to undermine their argument. By killing innocents (many of them Muslims), they are exposing the hollowness of their claims to be protecting the faith. Muslims can see through this.

It helps, too, that in the Arab world there is now demonstrable proof that change can happen without resorting to suicide bombs and IEDs. The Arab Spring may look messy to us in the West, but young people in that region are galvanized by the possibility of changing their lot. They’ve seen that dictators can be toppled by street protest. Bin Laden could never have imagined that.

It’s commonly believed that in the Koran there’s more than one original meaning of jihad, not just the internal struggle you speak of in your talk, but also the physical struggle to defend Islam. How would you respond to those who wish to perpetuate this meaning?

Yes, depending on how you choose to interpret it, jihad has more than one meaning, but nowhere in the Koran does it say it’s okay to kill innocent people. On the contrary, there are many passages that explicitly prohibit such killing.

In your article “The Agents of Outrage,” you mention Internet war-mongering by people like Sam Bacile, Terry Jones and Sheik Khaled Abdallah. What makes this specific kind of drudgery attractive to web users? Could this kind of outrage-machinery mobilization have been possible before the Internet?

The Internet makes it easier for these people to spread their poison, but equally, it allows the antidote to spread quickly. For every website that espouses hateful interpretations of the Koran, there are a dozen that seek to explain Islam in a reasoned manner. The trouble is not with the web, it’s with what happens in the “real” world, where agents provocateur sow discord, militants thrive in it, politicians stoke up the fear, and some people get carried away by it all.

I can’t understand the motivation of people who spread hate and fear in the name of faith, whatever their faith.

Finally: Yahoo! I’m glad you’re alive.

Thanks. … I think!

Comedian Maz Jobrani has some advice for anyone who happens to be Middle Eastern and getting on a plane in the United States.

“As a Middle Eastern male, I know there’s certain things I’m not supposed to say on an airplane in the U.S. I can’t walk down the aisle and be like, ‘Hi, Jack.’ Even if I’m there with my friend Jack, I say, ‘Greetings Jack,’” jokes Jobrani in today’s talk, filmed at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar. “The key, my Arab brothers and sisters, is that you throw in good words as you’re walking down the aisle.”

Jobrani’s suggestions: ‘strawberry,’ ‘rainbow’ or ‘tutti frutti.’

Jobrani, an Iranian-American who was a founding member of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, is known for poking fun at the strained relations between the West and the Middle East.

“A lot of Americans don’t know a lot about us in the Middle East. People don’t know we laugh,” says Jobrani in today’s talk. “We like to laugh, we like to celebrate life … I always encourage my friends to travel and see the Middle East — and vice versa. It helps stop problems of misunderstanding and stereotyping.”

To see an example of a Middle Eastern audience cracking up, watch Jobrani’s talk. And after the jump, see more from this comedian and his compatriots.

At TEDGlobal 2010, Jobrani talked about founding the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour with Ahmed Ahmed, who is Egyptian-American, and Aron Kader, who is Palestinian-American. In this bold talk, Jobrani pokes fun at his dual identity. “It causes a lot of inner conflict. Part of me likes me, part of me hates me,” he says. “Part of me thinks I should have a nuclear program; the other part thinks I can’t be trusted.”

In his comedy special Brown and Friendly, Jobrani talks about growing up in Iran and doing his best to blend in when he came to the United States. “I would play baseball, I would eat apple pie,” he says. “I would eat apple pie while playing baseball … Everything would be cool until my dad would come to pick me up.”

In this set from the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, Jobrani lays out the differences between Persians and Arabs. “We’re similar — we’re all getting shot at,” jokes Jobrani, before explaining why Iranians prefer to call themselves “Persian.”

Ahmed Ahmed spoke at TEDxDoha, making the point that when it comes to laughter, the Middle East and the West are actually very similar. “It’s great being a comedian. I get to travel all over the world and meet people from all over the world. The problem is getting there,” says Ahmed. “If you Google my name, it comes up on the FBI’s most wanted list. There’s this terrorist from Egypt and he kind of looks like me. I thought, ‘I gotta find this guy, he’s killing me.’ And then it dawned on me, maybe he’s in the Middle East Googling me and saying, ‘Bro, look, there’s this comedian in America, man. He’s using my name.’”

Aron Kader is the third member of the Axis of Evil comedy tour. In this video from the Just For Laughs Festival, Kader talks about “Making small talk with Palestinians.” He jokes, “Sometimes people ask me what my ethnicity is, and I’ll say Palestinian. And there’s never a follow-up question.”

Television producer Jamil Abu-Wardeh moved from London to Dubai with a vision: to bring stand-up comedy to the Middle East. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2010, he shares how he built on Jobrani, Ahmed and Kader’s work, and brought their brand of comedy to the Middle East. In this funny talk, he reveals how thousands came out to see the Axis of Evil Middle East Comedy Tour, which highlighted the work of Korean-Jordanian comic Won Ho Chung, and Nemr Abou Nassar, who is Lebanese. While these comedians could make any jokes they wanted, Abu-Wardeh urged them to stay away from the “three B’s” — blue material, beliefs and “bolitics.”

Shyam Sankar isn’t satisfied with the current state of data analysis. In his recent TEDTalk, “The rise of human-computer cooperation,” Sankar explained why we have a responsibility to create computer programs that drive human-centered decisions, rather than trying to supplant them with computer-centered data processing. In his talk, Sankar — the Director of Forward Deployed Engineering at Palantir Technologies, which is devoted to real-world data analysis — briefly touched on his company’s role in the case known as the Sinjar records.

In 2007, Palantir worked with the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to sift through and analyze files uncovered in Sinjar, Iraq, a town near the Syrian border, containing records for 700 foreign fighters recruited to aid al Qaeda in Iraq.

Curious to know more about this project, the TED Blog caught up with Sankar and Brian Fishman — then the lead researcher at the CTC on the Sinjar records, now working at Palantir — to talk about the role of the increasingly visible foreign fighters in Syria.

What is the relationship between the Sinjar records and the current conflict in Syria?

Sankar: When the [Syrian] regime was essentially helping — from an anti-American perspective — transit foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq to fuel the insurgency that was happening there, they never really contemplated that the ideological insurgents would settle into Syria, make that home, and then at a later point in time — with the Arab Spring — essentially fuel the insurgency and the revolt against the regime itself. And that a lot of the data that was captured in a context related to the counterinsurgency in Iraq would become critical to understanding who the players are that are actually fighting the Syrian regime right now.

Do you think that foreign fighter groups like al Qaeda are going to play a big role in the conflict in Syria?

Fishman: I think there’s pretty clear evidence that there is a strong jihadi component within the “rebel alliance” opposed to the Assad regime. I’m skeptical that al Qaeda or jihadis — and those two terms, we often use them interchangeably but they’re really not — I think they’re likely to benefit from the rebellion in Syria, but they’re unlikely to come to dominate the Syrian rebellion. I mean, most people, when given a choice between al Qaeda and basically anybody else, choose anybody else. But I think what you see now is that the jihadis, including al Qaeda, that have experience fighting in Afghanistan and experience fighting in Iraq, can bring militarily relevant skills to the table in Syria, and fighters that used to be, you know, bakers and shopkeepers, six months ago, are going to look for that kind of assistance where they can get it. One of the places they can get it these days is from jihadis.

You’ve got a dynamic where there is no singular opposition. There’s this immensely variable collection of people and organizations that are all sort of roughly pointed in the same direction and, within that mess, a group like al Qaeda and, speaking a little bit more broadly, jihadis in general, are going to be able to find folks that they can latch onto. What the Sinjar records showed was that there were these networks, some of them ideologically minded, some of them criminally minded, that existed in Syria going back to at least 2007, or at least 2006, that were tolerated to some degree by the Syrian regime.

And in some ways that’s just an extension of the same dynamic, right? At that point there was this wide collection of people that were generally pointed in the same direction, vis-à-vis Iraq, in that they didn’t like the American presence there and they wanted to disrupt that. But what you’re seeing, I think, is that when you play with groups like al Qaeda, there’s blowback, and when you play with jihadis, there tends to be blowback. We learned that in the 1980s in Afghanistan. I think the Assad regime has learned that in this case. Certainly many of the Iraqi tribal folks that cooperated with al Qaeda early in the Iraq War learned that, and I think that rebel groups in Syria are going to learn that now.

Without the Sinjar records and the more nuanced human-centric analysis that Palantir does, what difficulties might you have faced in trying to parse out these nebulous groups?

Sankar: Essentially [Palantir] allows you to go beyond the first order effects. So, the first order of realization from Sinjar is: Okay, we now know where the foreign fighters are coming from. The second order might be: Oh, I can now characterize how they’re getting here. What does the network of coordinators look like? That in and of itself is really interesting and novel and was difficult to do without Palantir. The third order of effects are things like: if you look at the rise of Libyan foreign fighters, it correlates significantly with a speech and the activity of Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was a prominent Libyan cleric, but he rose to becoming the number two in al Qaeda. And so having this early warning in 2007 that there’s a new dominant and prominent figure, that’s not in the data itself. It’s when you bring that data and combine it with all the other data, and the knowledge you have of the world, that the insight emerges.

Fishman: When we were doing this back in late 2007, early 2008, we had the Sinjar records, and we did a lot of hard work without Palantir at first, to do some basic statistics and learn what we could. We could do all of those kinds of things, but what we couldn’t do, or what would have been very, very difficult for us to do, was some of the second order analysis on, for example, the funnelers, the folks that helped transit people through Syria into Iraq. We had personnel records that corresponded to each individual traveling fighter, and we were able to generate statistics about that fighter, but we weren’t able to easily understand the networks that were embedded within that data asking different kinds of questions, and Palantir helped us ask those kinds of questions.

We were able to identify all of the different fighters that had coordinated with specific smugglers, and we could also easily see the kinds of payments that those fighters were making to each smuggler, and from that we were able to make judgments about whether or not those smugglers were motivated just by, you know, criminality and financial resources, or whether or not they were interested and motivated by ideology. That gave us a sense of what this network actually looked like in Syria, because it was extremely variable. You couldn’t just say, “Every smuggler in Syria is a jihadi.” Some of them were criminals, and understanding that variation is really important.

When you get lots of information loaded into a sort of dynamic platform like Palantir, you can ask any sort of question that comes to your mind, and you don’t necessarily know ahead of time the kinds of questions that you want to ask. I think that that’s illustrated even more now, when we look back, and we had no idea five years ago that the Sinjar records would be useful for at least having a starting point, a baseline, for understanding and thinking about the role of jihadis in a rebellion in Syria today.

How has human-centric data mining changed wartime intelligence tactics in the past few decades, especially since the first Persian Gulf War, or the 1990 Gulf War?

Sankar: In a more conventional fight, you have a well-defined adversary. I don’t want to pick on any country — but you have some country, that’s the adversary who is trying to hurt you. You’re trying to assess their motives, you’re trying to understand how they think about the world. Why are they moving tanks here or there? But as a result, the analysis — I don’t want to say it becomes linear — but the problem is significantly more constrained and focused. But in today’s world, it’s unclear who is your adversary or if you have an adversary. It’s more about understanding. Understanding is a very nuanced thing. And so you can’t just focus on you and the counter-party. You don’t even have a counter-party. It’s you and the world, and contextualizing every piece of information. And in a sense, you know, the Assad regime … you can understand the marriage of convenience that’s happening between the rebels and the ideologues, but you’re also going to want to understand in a post-Assad world how does that unfold? And a lot of that is going to be informed by, who are the ideologues? How are they meshing? Who are the personalities? What motivates them? It’s no longer a constrained counter-party. It’s a fabric, and mapping that fabric becomes very, very hard. It’s intractable using conventional means.

For the Center for Combating Terrorism at West Point, why is it so hard to snuff out members of jihadist groups? Is it because their technology evades us? Or is it something more traditional, like really well kept secrets, or big guns, or — in this case — just confusing data?

Fishman: A lot of the folks that have been involved in terrorist organizations over time seem to have gone offline. They’re not exposing themselves to technological data collection, and, you know, at the end of the day — garbage in, garbage out, right? If you don’t have that much data to analyze, then you don’t have that much to analyze.

Sankar: From my technologist’s perspective, if you think about the fundamental cycle of understanding, usually what happens is that a human is sitting down, thinking. They develop a hypothesis. They explore that hypothesis. That hypothesis leads to some amount of insight. But more interesting than the insight is actually the subsequent hypotheses that are generated from that exploration. So I think of something, I have an idea, I explore it, I come up with three new ideas that I need to explore. So deep understanding comes from maybe going around that cycle 20 times, so the velocity through which you can go through that cycle becomes really important. If you’re drowning in data on one hand and you don’t know where to start on the other, the most important thing is being able to get started and iterate on those cycles very quickly. So how quickly can I ask questions of the data and get answers so I can generate the next set of meaningful questions? Because it’s going to take me a while before the questions I’m actually asking are truly insightful and change the course of how we’re thinking about the world.

I think that’s the difficulty with the computer-only approach. The questions you can ask are highly constrained, and you never get to the interesting questions. In this context, what’s very difficult about analyzing the jihadists is it’s a very recent phenomenon, it’s changing very quickly — on a world history scale, it’s recent — and so we don’t necessarily always know where to begin or have the the depth of understanding that we do about, say, Russia, or just adversaries on a nation-state level.

In an article from Bloomberg Businessweek, the author cites a hypothetical example given by Palantir, in which we could use security video footage from an ATM machine or phone records or geolocation information to find out if a person is a potential terrorist. Shyam, as you mentioned in your talk, this kind of data mining obviously has dangerous implications for privacy and for people’s civil liberties. Could you speak to the gray areas in preemptive counterterrorism?

Sankar: Yes. … The paradox here is essentially in how you decide what data you’re going to share and what data you can use under what circumstances. We kind of bristle — I know it’s going to seem like a subtle technical distinction — but we bristle at the idea of being a data mining platform … [Here's] the data mining approach at the core level: Essentially, you develop an algorithm that looks at all the data to come up with things that the algorithm suspects are suspicious. Our approach is to have humans, who have to have predicates … where the data is actually protected. So, as a hypothetical example, if you’re in the Department of Defense, you can’t see any information on U.S. persons. Even though you’re seeing large amounts of data, the data you can see is constrained by constitutional and legal mandates, and having a way that is verifiable by a third party or an Inspector General that those mandates are enforced is part of the platform. So it’s a big deal. I think privacy and civil liberties are always a discussion around what, as a society, do we believe are the right rules and mandates, but our goal as a company is for democratic societies to be able to decide those rules and then guarantee that they’re enforced.

In Marc Goodman’s ominous talk on crime in the future, he gave an example of the terrorists’ ops center in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which was monitoring BBC, al Jazeera, CNN, and local stations in real time. What if the terrorists had access to Palantir? Are you ever worried that your work will fail to “protect the Shire,” as it were?

Sankar: Obviously it would be devastating, and we do everything we can to keep [Palantir] out of the wrong hands. In terms of failing to protect the Shire, we aspire to make the world a better place. We obviously can’t prevent every bad thing from happening, but I think it’s a noble thing for computer scientists — especially people who would otherwise kind of jokingly be in a cubicle unable to affect the world — to do what they can to make the world a better place.

You said earlier that you and Marc caught up in Palo Alto. Are your views in conflict with one another? While you are very idealistic about technology, he seems to have the cynic’s view.

Sankar: I don’t know if I’d call him a cynic. I know it can seem that way, but the question is — are we thinking critically about [technology’s implications]? Because the cynic, in my mind, and maybe this is because I’m a technologist, would be the Luddite who says, “Wow, look at how all this can be used for evil. We should just give up.” I think in Marc’s mind, by thinking critically about how it could be perverted and building defenses on it, we ensure the future, and that’s a perspective I agree with. When we were fighting the Russian mob, at Paypal — I called it organized crime in my talk, so as not to call it the Russians — I don’t need any more scrutiny from them. Their fundamental thing is they’re highly adaptive. They kept adapting to everything you learned how to block. And so I think that’s structurally similar to what’s Marc saying. It’s just the rate of adaptation and the level of damage the adversary can inflict have increased tremendously. So to not think about how someone could synthesize your DNA and put it at a crime scene, it calls the entire justice system that we’ve built into question since DNA testing came around, and I think that has some really interesting and fundamental implications. And I’m positive, as a technologist, as a society, we can figure out how to defeat that sort of gaming of our system — but not if we’re burying our head in the sand.

What on the frontier of human and computer interaction excites you?

Sankar: I think there’s a lot more to come with the integration of non-computer data. It could be video, images. It could be the way that people think about and categorize this sort of information, but essentially applied to really important problems. We’ve been doing some of this stuff with child pornography. The image itself has a lot of context — [for example,] where are they located? What’s going on? The platform was used to take down the largest child pornography ring in the world. At Google Ideas, we did a presentation — Brian’s actually pretty closely involved in it — on organ trafficking. Every one of these domains that we’re pushing into influences how we want to think about human-computer symbiosis. The question we tend to ask is: what is the problem in the world we want to solve? How can the technology support it? Which is exactly the same position that Licklider was coming from when he was thinking about human-computer symbiosis. And yes, artificial intelligence would be great, but today, what can I do today? Today I can use the computer to solve the problems in this way.

Fishman: Shyam’s the technologist here, but the idea that really fascinates me is the notion that one of the things that we’re doing at Palantir is redefining how information is stored and how people interact with it fundamentally. In the future, you could have libraries that were accessible through a platform like Palantir, where you are essentially exploring information via relationships, and books are modeled in Palantir. And that’s the kind of thing that I would like to see in the future, is ways to break down existing corpuses of data so that it’s more searchable, more accessible, easier for people to access globally. Because at the end of the day, the whole purpose here is to make this information accessible to people, so that they can do things with it, and I think that there is a lot we can do about bringing different incarnation sources into this platform in order to do that.

Sankar: We used to call it emancipatory intelligence. Most systems you need to be a technologist to use. Google made every person a researcher. Palantir makes every person an analyst.