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.

Articles by Kalev Leetaru

ATHENS, GREECE - JANUARY 26: The Greek flag flies at the Acropolis following the electoral success by Syriza in the Greek general election yesterday on January 26, 2015 in Athens, Greece. The radical left party Syriza won the snap Greek general election and has asked the right-wing Independent Greek party to form a anti-austerity coalition. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

A New Way To Read The Crisis in Greece

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July 31, 2015, 5:24 PM

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A Few Good Twitter Trolls

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July 14, 2015, 11:02 AM

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Tracking the Islamic State — With Words

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June 19, 2015, 7:00 PM

In this photograph taken on July 14, 2013, a resident (R) looks at the carcass of a male Sumatran elephant, its head and trunks mutilated and ivory tusks missing, in Aceh Jaya district on Indonesia's Sumatra island. According to Natural Resources Conservation Agency the elephant was killed by a booby trap set up by unidentified people. In the month of May three elephants were found dead in Tesso Nilo National Park, south of Aceh. Fewer than 3,000 endangered Sumatran elephants remain in the wild, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Rampant expansion of palm oil, paper plantations, and mines, has destroyed nearly 70 percent of the Sumatran elephant's forest habitat over 25 years, conservationist says, and the animals remain a target of poaching. AFP PHOTO / FIKRI RAMADHAVI (Photo credit should read FIKRI RAMADHAVI/AFP/Getty Images)

Can You Use Big Data to Track an Elephant Poacher?

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June 12, 2015, 3:36 PM

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Why We Can’t Just Read English Newspapers to Understand Terrorism

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April 15, 2015, 2:49 PM

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