Welcome: Kalev H. Leetaru

Kalev H. Leetaru co-founded his first company in 1995, Gamacles Software Corporation, becoming one of the early pioneers of the dot-com era before he had even entered high school. Gamacles' first product line was a web authoring suite in the days when web pages were still coded by hand in HTML, moving into electronic copyright enforcement after selling off its authoring division. By the time he was a junior in high school, Kalev's company had established its own reseller program, with sales coming in from throughout the world. As a freshman at the University of Illinois, he was honored as the first-ever freshman to be awarded University Student Employee of the Year.

In 2000, Kalev joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where he developed technologies across numerous disciplines, including ShadowLight-Mirage, a groundbreaking rapid prototyping and design environment that was used by the University of Illinois Department of Architecture continuously for two and a half years, by the United States Army, and was showcased at a Chicago gallery opening. An accomplished photographer, he manages the largest single provider of imagery of the University of Illinois, with over 22,000 image licenses, and his thesis work documenting the physical history of the University has become the authoritative resource on the subject. He founded the UIHistories Project, a collection of more than 300 biographies, 60,000 pages of digitized material, and more than 80,000 photographs of the University of Illinois. He has also authored three books that have been electronically published.

Kalev was the developer of and architect and technical director of the NCSA VIAS project. He is also the founder and chief photographer and historian of the UIPhotos, UIHistories, and UITours sites. An accomplished photographer, he manages the largest single provider of imagery of the University of Illinois, with over 22,000 image licenses, and his thesis work documenting the physical history of the University has become the authoritative reference on the subject.  He has also authored three books that have been electronically published.

His award-winning work on web mining, text processing, and content aggregation technologies have been at the forefront of several Fortune 50 corporate intelligence initiatives and he has served as an advisor to numerous industry and govermental organizations. He has been awarded three patents and has appeared in such popular press as Fortune Magazine, the New York Times, MSNBC, and US News & World Report. His work has received widespread recognition, including the NCSA 2003 Industrial Grand Challenge Award and the NCSA Private Sector Program Technology Development Award. In 2004, Kalev traveled to Sydney as part of a joint US-Australia workshop on increasing collaboration in high performance computing, and the following year was the Featured Student-Entrepreneur of the distinguished Kauffman Foundation Thoughtbook. Most recently he was interviewed in the Spanish cultural magazine Que Leer ("What to Read") in an article titled "What Will the World of the Library Look Like in 2020: Six Experts Predict the Future".

In addition to being Coordinator of Information Technology and Research at the University of Illinois Cline Center for Democracy, Kalev also serves as Chief Technology Advisor to the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science and is a Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, among his titled roles. At the Cline Center, he oversees the Eventalyzer project, an ambitious endeavor to catalog every major global event from 1946-present using the global news media. He also established and oversees the Center's mass digitization center, and authored the widely-cited comparison of Google Book Search and the Open Content Alliance.

Kalev has been a demonstrated leader in the innovative application of the Web and advanced computing to various problems of multidisciplinary information acquisition, management, and use and in the design of highly scalable innovative systems architectures. His visionary leadership has made his counsel highly sought-after in academic, corporate, and governmental circles in providing solutions to some of the field's most difficult problems. For more than a decade and a half he has been on the forefront of innovation, pioneering the technologies that foreshadow the future to come.