Dr. Kalev Hannes Leetaru

One of Foreign Policy Magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, Kalev is the founder of the GDELT Project, one of the largest open data archives of global human society. From mapping global conflict and modeling global narratives to providing the data behind one of the earliest alerts of the COVID-19 pandemic, from disaster response to countering wildlife crime, epidemic early warning to food security, estimating realtime global risk to mapping the global flow of ideas and narratives, GDELT explores how we can combine planetary-scale data with the infinite scalability of the cloud and over-the-horizon AI to let us see the world through the eyes of others and even forecast the future, capturing the realtime heartbeat of the planet we call home. From 2013-2014 Kalev was the Yahoo! Fellow in Residence of International Values, Communications Technology & the Global Internet at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he was also an Adjunct Assistant Professor, as well as a Council Member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. His work has been profiled in Nature, the New York Times, The Economist, BBC, Discovery Channel and the presses of more than 100 nations. In 2011 The Economist selected his Culturomics 2.0 study as one of just five science discoveries deemed the most significant developments of 2011. Kalev’s work focuses on how innovative applications of the world's largest datasets, computing platforms, algorithms and mindsets can reimagine the way we understand and interact with our global world.