Kalev Hannes Leetaru is an American internet entrepreneur, academic, and senior fellow at the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Sciencebr>Center for Cyber & Homeland Security
in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

He was a former

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

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 Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...

, before moving to

George Washington University The George Washington University (GW or GWU) is a Private university, private University charter#Federal, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C. Chartered in 1821 by the United States Congress, GWU is the largest Higher educat ...

Biography

Born to Hannes and Marilyn Leetaru, Leetaru co-founded a web company in 1995, while still in middle school. His first product was a web authoring suite (this was in the time when 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 The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

, Leetaru joined the

National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a ...

there. Leetaru's undergraduate thesis at the University was a detailed history of the University of Illinois, and formed the basis for the University of Illinois Histories Project. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University, Leetaru continued working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University, and also 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

Fellow in Residence at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at

and in 2014, he was appointed adjunct assistant professor at the University. Leetaru's research has focused on the use of big data and networks and their utility in prediction, including analyses of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, and geopolitical events. Leetaru is best known for his role as the co-creator of the

Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone 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-sca ...

(GDELT) with Philip Schrodt. He currently maintains the database and the underlying code.

Media coverage

Leetaru is a contributor to '' Foreign Policy'', where he discusses current political events worldwide, often drawing from GDELT data for his analyses. Leetaru's analysis of the relationships between articles on

, sponsored by

Silicon Graphics International Silicon Graphics International Corp. (SGI; formerly Rackable Systems, Inc.) was an American manufacturer of computer hardware and software, including high-performance computing systems, x86-based servers for datacenter deployment, and visualiz ...

, was covered in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

''. He has also been cited in ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' in an article about

usage. He has been cited in ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'' in connection with GDELT and as an expert on foreign affairs.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Leetaru, Kalev Grainger College of Engineering alumni Walsh School of Foreign Service faculty Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) Living people American people of Estonian descent Yahoo! people George Washington University faculty University of Illinois School of Information Sciences alumni