Kalev Leetaru

Kalev Hannes Leetaru is an American internet entrepreneur and academic, the Yahoo! 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.

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, Leetaru joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications 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 Yahoo! Fellow in Residence at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University 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 , Twitter, and geopolitical events.

Leetaru is best known for his role as the co-creator of the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) with Philip Schrodt. He currently maintains the database and the underlying code.

Leetaru is a contributor to Foreign Policy, where he discusses current political events worldwide, often drawing from GDELT data for his analyses.

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