Today at Web Summit we unveiled an exciting new initiative that will be unveiled in more detail in Wednesday's talk:

Lisbon, Portugal. As previewed at Collision this past June, the GDELT Project is excited to unveil at Web Summit this week the first glimpses of a powerful new series of initiatives leveraging the massive AI advances of the past year to sift through the firehose of global information to visualize and understand the heartbeat of the planet we call home.

One decade ago we published “The Global Conversation,” a visualization of global events in 2013 seen through the eyes of the newsmakers driving them, capping a series of planetary-scale maps of global news, social media, television, scholarship and even Wikipedia through projects like Culturomics 2.0 and the Global Twitter Heartbeat, exploring how machines could help us map the landscape of our digital world, what makes us human, our shared stories and our global dreams and fears.

This month we have begun embarking upon the next stage of that journey, leveraging the immense AI advances of the past year to return to that underlying question: how can we look across the whole of Planet Earth each day and transform the realtime deluge of the digital world’s live-chronicle of human life into a catalog of the world’s events, entities, narratives, dreams and fears and the infinite connections among them?

In a world ever more riven with divides and differences, how can such images and tools help us see the world through others’ eyes and bring us closer through our shared stories, to map the global flow of ideas and narratives and combat the flow of mis- and disinformation, to catch the earliest glimmers of tomorrow’s biggest stories and even forecast them before they happen?

See a first glimpse of this vision this week at Web Summit.