Using Big Data to Understand Global Conflict

From Islamic State’s march across Iraq to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the clustering of protests and violence in Nigeria, to the next emerging situations, big data is allowing analysts to track conflict globally, in real time. The Global Data on Events Location and Tone (GDELT (http://gdeltproject.org/)) project captures over a quarter-billion events in every country, down to the city level in realtime from 1979 to the last 15 minutes, across 100 languages, and with daily updates of 300,000 events a day, along with the emotions and narratives of the global reaction to them. GDELT’s founder, Kalev Leetaru, will discuss the emerging insights it is providing on global society and how big data can be used to forecast future unrest.

Biography:

Kalev Hannes Leetaru (http://kalevleetaru.com/), Senior Fellow, Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, George Washington University

One of Foreign Policy Magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, Kalev is a Senior Fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security and a member of its Counterterrorism and Intelligence Task Force, as well as a Council Member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. From 2013-2014 he 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 adjunct faculty. Kalev has been an invited speaker throughout the world, from the United Nations to the Library of Congress, Harvard to Stanford, Sydney to Singapore, while his work has appeared in the presses of more than 100 nations and from Nature to the New York Times. In 2011 The Economist selected his Culturomics 2.0 study as one of just five science discoveries deemed the most significant developments of 2011, while the following year HPCWire awarded him the Editor's Choice Award for Edge HPC (High Performance Computing) "representing the highest level of honor and recognition given to the thought leaders in the HPC community" and in 2013 noted "his research helped usher in the era of petascale humanities", while later that year his work on Twitter was recognized by Harvard's Neiman Lab as the top social media study of 2013.