In November 2012 GDELT creator Kalev Leetaru was selected to participate in the 2012 National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, The Informed Brain in a Digital World, which "brings together more than 100 of the nation's best and brightest researchers from academic, industrial, and government laboratories to ask questions about – and to discover interdisciplinary connections between – important areas of cutting-edge research. A National Academies-funded project resulted from this conference which is exploring how datasets like GDELT influence and impact the decision making process in government policymaking and intelligence.