Profile: Kalev H. Leetaru

Kalev H. Leetaru

University of Illinois
2001 S. First Street, Suite 207
Champaign, IL 61820
leetaru@illinois.edu

Short Biographical Sketch

Kalev H. Leetaru is Assistant Director for Text and Digital Media Analytics at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois and Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His award-winning work centers on the application of high performance computing to grand challenge problems using global information. He holds three US patents 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, Columbia Journalism Review, MSNBC, Que Leer, La Stampa, US News & World Report, Politico, Huffington Post, Library Quarterly, AAPG Explorer, and the American Council on Education's The Presidency, along with media outlets in more than 100 countries.

Research

Kalev's research focuses on a wide range of topics including international media flows, open source intelligence and the understanding and interaction of world events with the media, how news captures the world around us. Kalev's research area is highly interdisciplinary, combining a wide range of technologies, approaches, and disciplines. Through the synthesis of these fields and the unique opportunities posed by their collaboration, truly unique solutions can be delivered.

• Big Data / Supercomputing
• Digital History
• Digitization
• Education Trends
• Funding Analysis
• Gender Diversity in Engineering
• GIS / Geocoding / Geographic Intelligence (GEOINT) / Spatial Representation
• Intelligence and Corporate Intelligence / Media Analysis / Industry Monitoring / Brand Mining / Public Perception / Social Media / Event Mining
• Knowledge Management
• Measurements and Metrics from Non-Traditional Sources
• Media Management
• Natural Language Processing / Text Mining / Classification / Unstructured Text / Learning Systems
• Network Analysis / Relationship Extraction
• Records Management
• Sentiment Analysis
• Translation
• Virtual Reality

Innovation

Kalev founded his first web software company in the eighth grade, just two years after the Web reached the masses. After selling the company's web authoring division, he expanded it into new markets with its own reseller program and international sales by the time he was in high school. His work has been awarded two United States patents (both filed as an undergraduate) with a third patent pending and nearly 50 Invention Disclosures with the University of Illinois Office of Technology Management. He is the chief architect of the largest open source intelligence project in academia, founded the highest-volume microform digitization center in academia, and founded the premier global news and intelligence monitoring service on climate change. His research team was a pioneer in web mining and online media monitoring, working with Fortune 50 corporations to understand the value of online perception of their brands and industry before "brand mining" was a term. As a digital historian and photographer, he founded the first comprehensive digital library and first comprehensive digital image archive of a major US university and his images of the University of Illinois have been licensed more than 22,000 times and have appeared in publications from all divisions of the University, from annual reports to wall-sized art and covers of magazines and textbooks.