Kalev H. Leetaru, University of Illinois, USA

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.