Using “Big Data” To Understand the World Around Us: Towards Realtime Modeling, Monitoring, and Forecasting Global Society
Electronic media is allowing faster, more representative, and round-the-clock access to societal behavior around the globe.
Today, people from Bangladesh to Buenos Aires busily tell one another and their neighbors what they see, what they think, and what is
important to them, offering unparalleled visibility into the heartbeat of global
society. Citizens are becoming a vast ground-based social sensor network,
providing a continuous real-time picture of almost every corner of the world,
while the news media increasingly relies on social channels to contextualize
those thoughts into rich narratives that transcend traditional journalistic
boundaries. The proliferation of always-connected mobile devices has meant that
citizens and participants are often the first to report on emerging events,
streaming photographs, videos, and ground reports minutes to hours before the
first mainstream media reporters arrive or in areas where media are unable to
access. Moreover the volume of this societal live-documentary is increasing at
an incredible rate: more than two and a half times as many words are posted to
Twitter every day as in every article of every issue of the New York Times
over the last half-century. This constant stream of daily life that flows
across media platforms provides rich contextual background information on the
narratives and patterns of daily life of each region and culture that can shed
new light on the understanding of global society and the inflection points
between latent and physical societal unrest.
This talk will focus on the emerging application of “big data”
computational analysis to vast new archives of human behavior to develop new
models around societal behavior and towards realtime monitoring of the
“global heartbeat.”
Speaker Biosketch: Kalev H. Leetaru holds University of Illinois and Josie B. Houchens
Fellowships 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 and more than 50 University Invention Disclosures and has been an invited
speaker, panelist, and discussant at venues including TEDxTallinn, IAB Poland, the
Library of Congress, Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford, 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.