Kalev H.Leetaru: Culturomics 2.0

September 8, 2012 by Gail
Filed under VidStyle

Kalev H. Leetaru is a scientist. His award-winning work centres on the application of high performance computing to grand challenge problems using news and open sources intelligence. He has been programming computers since childhood and started his first web company in the 8th Grade. Overtime, Kalev’s numerous projects have become increasingly inter-disciplinary and global.

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ABOUT Kalev H. Leetaru

“Kalev co-founded his first web company in 1995, becoming one of the early pioneers of the dot-com era before he had even entered High School. His first product line was a web authoring suite in the days when web pages were still coded by hand in HTML, moving into electronic copyright enforcement after selling off its authoring division.

By the time he was a Junior in High School, Kalev’s company had established its own Reseller programme, with sales coming in from throughout the world.

In 2000, Kalev joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) the home of the modern web browser, where he developed technologies across numerous disciplines. This included ShadowLight-Mirage, a ground breaking virtual reality rapid prototyping and design environment that was used by the University of Illinois Department of Architecture and the United States Army.

He is the chief architect of the largest open source intelligence project in academia, founded the highest-volume Microform Digitisation Center at an academic institution, and founded the premier global news and intelligence monitoring service on Climate Change.

His research team was a pioneer in web mining, online media monitoring, and ‘big data’, working with Fortune 50 corporations to understand the value of online perception of their brands and industry and to survey and understand their market places before ‘brand mining’ or ‘big data’ were terms.”

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