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Kalev H. Leetaru is a University Fellow at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science and is Former Assistant Director for Text and Digital Media Analytics and Former Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science and Former Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

His award-winning work centers on the application of high performance computing and "big data" to grand challenge problems. He holds three US patents (cited by 26 others) and more than 50 University Invention Disclosures and has been an invited speaker, panelist, and discussant at venues including the Library of Congress, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, while his work has been profiled in venues as diverse as Nature, the New York Times, BBC, Discovery Channel, The Atlantic, Fortune Magazine, The Economist, Columbia Journalism Review, MSNBC, Que Leer and media outlets in more than 100 countries. His 2011 "Culturomics 2.0" study was selected by The Economist as one of just five science discoveries deemed the most significant developments of 2011. [Read More...]
     Interview with Wired Magazine: Big Data and the Death of the Theorist
In December 2012 while in London, Kalev spoke with Ian Steadman of Wired Magazine about the future of big data in studying human society and the role big data analytics is playing vis-a-vis the traditional realm of theory-driven scholarship. [MORE FEATURES]
     Mapping the Civil War Through HathiTrust's One Billion Pages of Books
In a collaboration with noted Civil War historian Vernon Burton, Kalev mapped the geography of the Civil War discourse through HathiTrust's nearly one billion pages of digitized books 1800-1923, developing new approaches to geographic narrative analysis and mapping to cope with the scale, historical discourse, and complexities of working with nearly a billion pages of material. The first results of this collaboration were presented in Professor Burton's Presidential Address to the Southern History Association. [MORE FEATURES]
     Council on Foreign Relations Workshop on Social Media and Conflict Prevention.
In December 2012, Kalev traveled to Washington DC to speak at the Council on Foreign Relations Workshop on Social Media and Conflict Prevention, hosted by the Council's Center for Preventive Action. Other speakers included Assistant Secretary of State for Conflict and Stabilization Operations Frederick Barton. Kalev's speech surveyed an array of projects he is involved in that blend social and mainstream media in realtime assessments of populations around the world. In January 2013 he was among four experts interviewed for CFR's Ask the Experts: Social Media and Conflict Prevention thoughtpiece. [MORE FEATURES]
     ICCM Talk at World Bank on Realtime Automated Risk Forecasting
In October 2012, Kalev traveled to Washington DC to speak at the International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM 2012) at the World Bank headquarters on the area of Realtime Automated Risk Forecasting, leveraging the emerging world of massive "big data" and enormous computational resources to assess the realtime "pulse" of global society and spatial and temporal trends. [MORE FEATURES]
     Big Data Analytics 2012 in London
In December 2012 Kalev traveled to London to speak at Big Data Analytics 2012, the United Kingdom's "largest and most prestigious cross-industry event for the Large Enterprise Sector... bringing together CEO's, Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Business Directors, Heads of BI and Chief Data Scientists to discuss how to find oppotunities in Big Data Streams with advanced analytics." Kalev spoke on his latest work on modeling global societal function using the largest shared memory supercomputer in the world, the SGI UV2000 system. [MORE FEATURES]
     United Kingdom Science & Technology Facilities Council Big Data Conference
In December 2012 Kalev traveled to Daresbury in the United Kingdom to present at the joint SGI and United Kingdom Science & Technology Facilities Council "Unleash the Power of Big Data" conference hosted on the Sci-Tech Daresbury campus. STFC is tasked with maintaining the nation at the "forefront of international science and tackling some of the most significant challenges facing society" and maintains the largest single supercomputer in the United Kingdom. Kalev spoke on his latest work on modeling global societal function using the largest shared memory supercomputer in the world, the SGI UV2000 system. [MORE FEATURES]
     National Academies Keck Futures Initiative
In November 2012 Kalev was selected to participate in the 2012 National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, The Informed Brain in a Digital World, which "brings together more than 100 of the nation's best and brightest researchers from academic, industrial, and government laboratories to ask questions about - and to discover interdisciplinary connections between - important areas of cutting-edge research. [MORE FEATURES]
     Global Twitter Heartbeat Project
In a collaboration with SGI and the University of Illinois' CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information (CIGI) Laboratory we debuted the first-ever realtime combined population, tone, and geographic analysis of the live Twitter Decahose (10% of all tweets globally), creating a realtime map of global dreams and fears. Over the course of the annual 2012 Supercomputing conference we displayed both live global and US maps of emotion on Twitter in realtime in the SGI booth and on its website, updated once per second, using a 256-core 4TB RAM supercomputer, the first time all of these dimensions were ever visualized of a social media stream in realtime. Additional movies were created to show Hurricane Sandy and the 2012 US presidential election as viewed through the eyes of Twitter. [MORE FEATURES]
     2012 Winner of HPCWire Editor's Choice Edge HPC Award
Kalev's 2012 collaboration with supercomputer manufacturer SGI to create the first geographic historical visualization of Wikipedia's view of the world earned the 2012 HPCWire Editor's Choice Award for "Best use of HPC in an 'edge HPC' application" and "represent the highest level of honor and recognition given to the thought leaders in the HPC community by their own during the most important supercomputing event of the year." [MORE FEATURES]
     Global Twitter Heartbeat Project: PufferSphere
In a collaboration with SGI and the University of Illinois' CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information (CIGI) Laboratory we debuted the first-ever realtime combined population, tone, and geographic analysis of the live Twitter Decahose (10% of all tweets globally), creating a realtime map of global dreams and fears. We displayed the live Twitter emotional heatmaps on both an 80" LCD monitor and a Pufferfish PufferSphere, which is an internally-projected spherical display which uses a fisheye lens to project an image from a bottom-mounted projector across the spherical display surface, rather than from outside onto the sphere, allowing visitors to walk directly up to the image. In essence we delivered the world on a sphere. [MORE FEATURES]
     Global Twitter Heartbeat Project: Hurricane Sandy
In a collaboration with SGI and the University of Illinois' CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information (CIGI) Laboratory we debuted the first-ever realtime combined population, tone, and geographic analysis of the live Twitter Decahose (10% of all tweets globally), creating a realtime map of global dreams and fears. As one demonstration, we visualized Hurricane Sandy's impact on the United States through the eyes of Twitter. [MORE FEATURES]
     Global Twitter Heartbeat Project: US Presidential Election
In a collaboration with SGI and the University of Illinois' CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information (CIGI) Laboratory we debuted the first-ever realtime combined population, tone, and geographic analysis of the live Twitter Decahose (10% of all tweets globally), creating a realtime map of global dreams and fears. As one demonstration, we visualized the United States Presidential Election through the eyes of Twitter. [MORE FEATURES]
     Global Twitter Heartbeat Project: Making Of
In a collaboration with SGI and the University of Illinois' CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information (CIGI) Laboratory we debuted the first-ever realtime combined population, tone, and geographic analysis of the live Twitter Decahose (10% of all tweets globally), creating a realtime map of global dreams and fears. This video goes behind the scenes of how this project came together. [MORE FEATURES]
     Culturomics 2.0 at TEDxTallinn
Featured in Nature, BBC, Discovery, and the media in over 100 countries, Kalev spoke about his work at TEDxTallinn. Using an archive of 100 million global news articles spanning a quarter-century, a 2.4 petabyte network of 10 billion people, places, and things, and 100 trillion relationships are used to forecast the Arab Spring, pinpoint Bin Laden's location, and visualize human society's evolution. [MORE FEATURES]
     Keynote Address at 2012 IIPC General Assembly at the Library of Congress
I presented the keynote address opening the 2012 IIPC General Assembly at the Library of Congress on my experiences and vision of the web archive as a resource for studying society in the digital era. This short case video discusses some of my work on the power of web archives as a resource for forecasting geo-political activity. [MORE FEATURES]
     Wikipedia Study Showcased on NOAA Science on a Sphere
The World According to Wikipedia, a collaboration with SGI and their new UV2 supercomputer to visualize Wikipedia's view of world history 1800-2012, is now available on the NOAA Science on a Sphere network, seen by over 24 million people a year! Read more about the Intensity and Tone visualizations. [MORE FEATURES]
     Wikipedia Study Showcases SGI UV2 Launch
In collaboration with SGI, the new UV2 supercomputer, which scales to 4,000 cores and 64TB in a single system image, was used to interactively explore Wikipedia's view of world history 1800-2012 and the underlying spatial-temporal knowledge network of Wikipedia's 4M pages, including 120 million locations and dates. This study marked the first time a digital humanities project has ever showcased the launch of a new supercomputer and captures the importance of big data in modern supercomputing. Covered widely from the New York Times to the Atlantic Wire's Chart of the Day. Movies: Tone / Intensity. [MORE FEATURES]
     SGI Wikipedia Study
SGI's new UV2 supercomputer, scalable to 64TB of RAM, was used to visualize world history 1800-2012 captured by Wikipedia. More than 80M locations and 40M dates were extracted from Wikipedia's 4M English articles to build a knowledge network of Wikipedia itself. Covered widely from the New York Times to the Atlantic Wire's Chart of the Day. Movies: Tone / Intensity. [MORE FEATURES]
     Behind The Scenes: The Making of the SGI Wikipedia Project
Get a behind-the-scenes look at the SGI Wikipedia project and learn more about how the world's largest shared-memory exploration supercomputer brought Wikipedia's view of history to life! [MORE FEATURES]
     The World According to Wikipedia
SGI's new UV2 supercomputer, scalable to 64TB of RAM, was used to visualize world history 1800-2012 captured by Wikipedia. More than 80M locations and 40M dates were extracted from Wikipedia's 4M English articles to build a knowledge network of Wikipedia itself. Covered widely from the New York Times to the Atlantic Wire's Chart of the Day. Alternative View Intensity. See More. [MORE FEATURES]
     IIPC Talk on the Future of Web Archives at the Library of Congress
Kalev gave the keynote address opening the 2012 General Assembly of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) at the Library of Congress on his vision of the future of web archives. A longer version of his talk was syndicated on the Library of Congress blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and as an IIPC Report. [MORE FEATURES]
     New Routledge Book: Data Mining Methods for the Content Analyst
Kalev's latest book is now available from Routledge, titled Data Mining Methods for the Content Analyst: An Introduction to the Computational Analysis of Informational Content. This introductory book surveys the entire field of computational approaches to content analysis and is designed for both the new user interested in learning about computational content analysis for the first time through the experienced researcher interested in expanding his or her portfolio and learning more about the underlying theories. [MORE FEATURES]
     Culturomics 2.0 at SGI 2012 User Conference
Featured in Nature, BBC, Discovery, and the media in over 100 countries, Kalev presented his Culturomics 2.0 work as the keynote at the 2012 SGI User Conference in Orlando, Florida. See the video introducing the keynote. Using an archive of 100 million global news articles spanning a quarter-century, a 2.4 petabyte network of 10 billion people, places, and things, and 100 trillion relationships are used to forecast the Arab Spring, pinpoint Bin Laden's location, and visualize human society's evolution. [MORE FEATURES]
     Opening Big Data Week
Kalev presented some of the welcoming remarks introducing Big Data Week and touching on the incredible growth of observational social data and the datasets available today to study human societal behavior at a global scale. [MORE FEATURES]
     Culturomics 2.0 at IAB Poland 2011
Featured in Nature, BBC, Discovery, and the media in over 100 countries, Kalev presented his Culturomics 2.0 work at IAB Poland 2011, the main Polish internet and media conference. See interview with Polish media. Using an archive of 100 million global news articles spanning a quarter-century, a 2.4 petabyte network of 10 billion people, places, and things, and 100 trillion relationships are used to forecast the Arab Spring, pinpoint Bin Laden's location, and visualize human society's evolution. [MORE FEATURES]
     Culturomics 2.0 on Russia Today
Featured in Nature, BBC, Discovery, and the media in over 100 countries, Kalev was interviewed by Russian television station Russia Today. Using an archive of 100 million global news articles spanning a quarter-century, a 2.4 petabyte network of 10 billion people, places, and things, and 100 trillion relationships are used to forecast the Arab Spring, pinpoint Bin Laden's location, and visualize human society's evolution. [MORE FEATURES]
     Culturomics 2.0 on Polish Mediafun
Featured in Nature, BBC, Discovery, and the media in over 100 countries, Kalev presented his Culturomics 2.0 work at IAB Poland 2011, the main Polish internet and media conference, and was interviewed by Polish technology outlet Mediafun. Using an archive of 100 million global news articles spanning a quarter-century, a 2.4 petabyte network of 10 billion people, places, and things, and 100 trillion relationships are used to forecast the Arab Spring, pinpoint Bin Laden's location, and visualize human society's evolution. [MORE FEATURES]
     Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting Large-Scale Human Behavior Using Global News Media Tone in Time and Space
Using an archive of 100 million global news articles spanning a quarter-century, a 2.4 petabyte network of 10 billion people, places, and things, and 100 trillion relationships are used to forecast the Arab Spring, pinpoint Bin Laden's location, and visualize human society's evolution. Featured in Nature and covered in media across the world including BBC and Russia Today. [MORE FEATURES]
     Social Media Workshop
This one-hour, two-hour, or half-day shortcourse covers a wide-ranging overview of how the modern organization can make the most from social media. Topics covered include internal collaboration, connecting with customers, recruiting, crowdsourcing of ideas (both internally and from customers), brand and industry mining, customer interaction, corporate intelligence, crisis communication in the social sphere, and advanced modeling and analysis of social media. [MORE FEATURES]
     Soundbite University
Featured by ACE's The Presidency, this study traced the changing role of higher education in the national news media over the last half-century and its shift from a newsmaker to a news commentator, suggesting a need for universities to profoundly change the ways in which they interact with the press. [MORE FEATURES]
     The Carbon Capture Report
Featured in the New York Times and AAPG Explorer and with subscribers in over 100 countries, the Carbon Capture Report is one the leading global resources for daily insight into the discourse around climate change and the energy sectors. [MORE FEATURES]
     The Deeper Story of Google Books and the Open Content Alliance
Featured in Que Leer, the preeminent Spanish cultural magazine, this study was the first to quantitatively compare the Google Books and Open Content Alliance initiatives and uncover a number of unexpected similarities and differences between the projects. [MORE FEATURES]
     New Media vs Old Media: The Drudge Report
Twice featured by Columbia Journalism Review and covered by a wide range of national press, this study traces the evolution of the Drudge Report 2002-2008, using more than 170,000 snapshots taken every 2 minutes, to uncover what makes the site "tick" and how Drudge finds the stories that will go big tomorrow. [MORE FEATURES]
     Airbrushing History
Featured in the New York Times and international media, this study traces how key White House press releases were constantly revised over several years, illustrating the ease with which critical government documents can be altered in the digital era. [MORE FEATURES]

     RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
     HIGHLIGHTED PUBLICATIONS
     SPOTLIGHTS
     CONTENT ANALYSIS BOOK

Kalev's latest book is available from Routledge! Data Mining Methods for the Content Analyst: An Introduction to the Computational Analysis of Informational Content.

This introductory book surveys the entire field of computational approaches to content analysis and is designed for both the new user interested in learning about computational content analysis for the first time through the experienced researcher interested in expanding his or her portfolio and learning more about the underlying theories.
© 1995-2013 Kalev H. Leetaru