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Our Top Weekend Reads

Why Biden thinks the way he does about foreign policy, what the future holds for an America on the brink, and what the Cold War policy of containment means for our current moment—all from our latest magazine issue.

5 Top Reads |

Allison Meakem

Trump Mounts Last-Minute Attempt to Starve Funding for Foreign Aid, Global Vaccine Efforts

But congressional sources say it’s highly unlikely lawmakers will cut billions of dollars of already appropriated funding.

Report |

Robbie Gramer

The End of Swiss Neutrality

The country is campaigning for a seat on the U.N. Security Council, but taking on that role will clash with some fundamental tenets of Swiss foreign policy.

Argument |

Stéphanie Fillion

Far-Right Extremism Is a Global Problem

And it is time to treat it like one.

Argument |

Heather Ashby

Kalev H. Leetaru is the 2013-2014 Yahoo! Fellow in Residence for International Values, Communications Technology and the Global Internet at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

His award-winning work centers on the application of high performance computing (ie “big data”) to the study of human society, bringing together novel datasets, innovative algorithms, and the most powerful computing platforms in the world to study human society in fundamentally new ways and at unprecedented scales that change the way we see the world.

He holds three US patents cited by a combined 41 other patents and his work has been covered in the press of over 100 countries. He first book is “Data Mining Methods for the Content Analyst: An Introduction to the Computational Analysis of Informational Content” (link: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415895149/) from Routledge, an introduction to data mining for non-technical users. Among his recent publications are the largest-scale geographic studies of social media, “Mapping the Global Twitter Heartbeat: The Geography of Twitter” (link: http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654) and “Towards a Geographically Enriched Wikipedia,”(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september12/leetaru/09leetaru.html) the largest application of geographically-centered news tone to forecast political risk “Culturomics 2.0,”( http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3663/3040) the largest political event dataset ever created “The Global Database Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone,” (http://gdelt.utdallas.edu) and forthcoming studies on television news, historical books, and other information modalities.

Most recently he co-created the Global Database Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) (link: http://gdeltblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/announcing-the-debut-of-the-gdelt-global-knowledge-graph/) with Philip Schrodt, Patrick Brandt, and John Beieler, as an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world over the last quarter-century down to the city level globally, to make all of this data freely available for open research, and to provide daily updates to create the first "realtime social sciences earth observatory." Nearly a quarter-billion georeferenced events capture global behavior in more than 300 categories covering 1979 to present with daily updates. The GDELT Global Knowledge Graph (GKG) expands GDELT's ability to quantify global human society beyond cataloging physical occurrences towards actually representing all of the latent dimensions, geography, and network structure of the global news. It attempts to connect every person, organization, location, count, theme, news source, and event appearing in the global news into a single massive network that captures what's happening around the world, what its context is and who's involved, and how the world is feeling about it, every single day.

More information on his latest projects is available on his website http://www.kalevleetaru.com

Kalev Leetaru

Kalev H. Leetaru is a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security and a council member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. He created the GDELT Project and focuses on big data and global society.

Stories by Kalev Leetaru