Kalev Leetaru

Last updated
Kalev Leetaru Kalev H. Leetaru in TEDxTallinn.jpg
Kalev Leetaru

Kalev Hannes Leetaru is an American internet entrepreneur, academic, and senior fellow at the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science Center for Cyber & Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. [1] [2] He was a former Yahoo! Fellow in Residence of International Values, Communications Technology & the Global Internet at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, [3] before moving to George Washington University.

Contents

Biography

Born to Hannes and Marilyn Leetaru, [4] Leetaru co-founded a web company in 1995 while in middle school. His first product was a web authoring suite. (During this time, websites were still built directly into HTML and content management systems; Javascript, and CSS were not used widely.) In 2000, while an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Leetaru joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications there. [3] [5] [6] Leetaru's undergraduate thesis was a history of the University of Illinois and formed the basis for the University of Illinois Histories Project. [7]

After finishing his undergraduate studies, Leetaru continued working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and held positions at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the university. In 2013, he started as a Yahoo! Fellow in Residence at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, [3] [5] and in 2014, he was appointed adjunct assistant professor at the university. [5]

Leetaru's research has focused on the use of big data and networks and their utility in prediction, including analyses of Wikipedia, Twitter, and geopolitical events. [8]

Leetaru is best known for his role as the co-creator of the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) with Philip Schrodt. He currently maintains the database and the underlying code. [9] [10] [11]

Media coverage

Leetaru is a contributor to Foreign Policy , where he discusses current political events worldwide, often drawing from GDELT data for his analyses. [12]

Leetaru's analysis of the relationships between articles on Wikipedia, sponsored by Silicon Graphics International, was covered in The New York Times . [13] He has also been cited in The Wall Street Journal in an article about Twitter usage. [14] He has been cited in The Washington Post in connection with GDELT [15] and as an expert on foreign affairs. [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georgetown University</span> Private university in Washington, D.C.

Georgetown University is a private Jesuit research university in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., United States. Founded by Bishop John Carroll in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic institution of higher education in the United States and the nation's first federally chartered university.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walsh School of Foreign Service</span> School of international affairs at Georgetown University

The Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) is the school of international relations at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. It grants degrees at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georgetown University Law Center</span> Private law school in Washington, D.C., US

The Georgetown University Law Center is the law school of Georgetown University, a private research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It was established in 1870 and is the largest law school in the United States by enrollment, with over 2,000 students. It frequently receives the most full-time applications of any law school in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McDonough School of Business</span> Business school of Georgetown University

The Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business, commonly shorted to the McDonough School of Business and abbreviated as the MSB, is the business school of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1957, it grants both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and is one of the university's nine constituent schools. Since 1998, the school has been named in honor of Georgetown alumnus Robert Emmett McDonough.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elliott School of International Affairs</span> International relations school of George Washington University

The Elliott School of International Affairs is the professional school of international relations, foreign policy, and international development of the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. It is highly ranked in international affairs and is the largest school of international relations in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morrow Plots</span> United States historic place

The Morrow Plots is an experimental agricultural field at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Named for Professor George E. Morrow, it is the oldest such field in the United States and the second oldest in the world. It was established in 1876 as the first experimental corn field at an American college and continues to be used today, although with three half-acre plots, instead of the original ten. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark on May 23, 1968. The fields are managed by the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences.

Anthony Clark Arend is an American international relations scholar. As of September 2024 he is department chair of the Department of Government at Georgetown University, and Professor of Government and Foreign Service.

David Adolph Korn was an American diplomat, former United States Ambassador to Togo, author, and foreign service officer. He was appointed to his ambassadorship position on October 16, 1986, and left that post on April 4, 1988.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tod Lindberg</span> American writer and political theorist

Tod Lindberg is an American political expert and a current Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, having previously been at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. His research focuses on political theory, international relations, national security policy, and American politics. He was also the editor of Policy Review, the Hoover Institution's bimonthly journal. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Peter Frederic Krogh is an academic and diplomat who served as Dean of Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service from 1970 to 1995. Born in California in 1937, Krogh graduated from Harvard University in 1958 with a B.A. cum laude in Economics and later received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Since then, prominent positions he has held include White House Fellow, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, and Dean Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University.

Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts. Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mortara Center for International Studies</span> Academic research center in Washington D.C., U.S.

The Mortara Center for International Studies is an academic research center at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. As part of Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, the Mortara Center organizes and co-sponsors lectures, seminars, and conferences and provides support for research and publications on international affairs. The Mortara Center was established through a gift from the Michael and Virginia Mortara Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jill Dougherty</span> American journalist

Jill Dougherty is an American journalist and academic. She is considered an expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angela Stent</span> British-American foreign policy academic

Angela E. Stent is a British-born American foreign policy expert specializing in US and European relations with Russia and Russian foreign policy. She is professor emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and senior advisor and director emerita of its Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has served in the Office of Policy Planning in the US State Department and as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia.

Stuart W. Holliday is the CEO of Meridian International Center (Meridian) a nonprofit diplomacy center located in Washington, D.C. The former U.S. Ambassador for Special Political Affairs at the United Nations, Holliday continues to engage in diplomatic activities at Meridian, where he oversees diplomatic exchanges between the U.S. and other countries, often collaborating with the U.S. Department of State, embassies, public and private organizations and leaders worldwide. The organization’s stated goal is to promote diplomatic engagement to overcome shared global challenges, which it achieves through a wide scope of exchange programs.

The GDELT Project, or Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone, created by Kalev Leetaru of Yahoo! and Georgetown University, along with Philip Schrodt and others, describes itself as "an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world, connecting every person, organization, location, count, theme, news source, and event across the planet 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." Early explorations leading up to the creation of GDELT were described by co-creator Philip Schrodt in a conference paper in January 2011. The dataset is available on Google Cloud Platform.

Philip Andrew "Phil" Schrodt is a political scientist known for his work in automated data and event coding for political news. On August 1, 2013, he announced that he was leaving his job as professor at Pennsylvania State University to become a full-time consultant. Schrodt is currently a senior research scientist at the statistical consulting firm Parus Analytical Systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Main Library (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)</span> United States historic place

The Main Library is a historic library on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Illinois. Built in 1924, the library was the third built for the school; it replaced Altgeld Hall, which had become too small for the university's collections. Architect Charles A. Platt designed the Georgian Revival building, one of several on the campus which he designed in the style. The building houses several area libraries, as well as the University Archives and the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Main Library is the symbolic face of the University Library, which has the second largest university library collection in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernadette Meehan</span> American diplomat (born 1975)

Bernadette M. Meehan is an American diplomat who has served as the United States ambassador to Chile since 2022. She previously worked as chief international officer for the Obama Foundation. She also served as a spokesperson for the United States National Security Council in the Obama Administration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aaron Klieman</span> Academician and Public Policy expert (1939–2021)

Aaron (Aharon) S. Klieman was an American-born Israeli historian of international relations who developed the field of international affairs in Israel and abroad. Klieman researched a wide variety of fields in political science including history, arms sales, and geopolitics. He was the Dr. Nahum Goldmann Chair in Diplomacy and lecturer on international relations in the Department of Political Science at Tel-Aviv University, and was the founding director of the Abba Eban Graduate Program in Diplomatic Studies. A native of Chicago, Illinois, his PhD is from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, with an M.A. from the School of International Affairs at Columbia University in Middle Eastern studies.

References

  1. Leetaru, Kalev. "In The Cloud Era Why Do Government Websites Still Go Dark During Shutdowns?". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-04-02.
  2. "Kalev Leetaru". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-04-02.
  3. 1 2 3 Leetaru, Kalev. "About" . Retrieved June 3, 2014.
  4. Kalev Leetaru (2012). Data Mining Methods for the Content Analyst: An Introduction to the Computational Analysis of Content. Routledge. p. 5. ISBN   978-0-415-89513-2.
  5. 1 2 3 Leetaru, Kalev. "Vita" (PDF). Retrieved June 3, 2014.
  6. "Changing the World Through Creative Entrepreneurship: A Profile of University of Illinois Student-Entrepreneur Kalev Leetaru" (PDF). Kauffman Thoughtbook 2005 (pages 87-92).
  7. "UIHistories Project" . Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  8. Leetaru, Kalev. "Research" . Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  9. "About GDELT". The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone . Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  10. Keating, Joshua (April 10, 2013). "What can we learn from the last 200 million things that happened in the world?". Foreign Policy. Archived from the original on June 6, 2014. Retrieved June 2, 2014.
  11. Heaven, Douglas (May 13, 2013). "World's largest events database could predict conflict". New Scientist . Retrieved June 2, 2014.
  12. "Kalev Leetaru". Foreign Policy . Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  13. Hardy, Quentin (June 14, 2012). "How Big Data Sees Wikipedia" . Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  14. "The Race to Locate Twitter Users". The Wall Street Journal. April 8, 2014. Archived from the original on April 9, 2014. Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  15. Taylor, Adam (March 24, 2014). "What big data can tell us about the relationships between world leaders". The Washington Post . Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  16. "Report: White House Deleted 'Coalition of the Willing' Lists". The Washington Post . December 8, 2008. Archived from the original on June 4, 2014. Retrieved June 4, 2014.