- Inaugural Cambridge Zero Fellow
- Research Staff
Ramit Debnath is currently a university assistant professor and inaugural Cambridge Zero fellow at the University of Cambridge, and a visiting faculty associate at Caltech's Humanities and Social Sciences division. He leads the Cambridge Collective Intelligence & Design Group.
Biography
At CST, Ramit is leading a research project on improving public understanding of climate action using social data science with Prof. Emily Shuckburgh.
Ramit seeks to understand what is desirable machine intelligence for climate action. He uses design thinking, justice theory, NLP, machine learning and AI to reduce misinformation, recover trust and remove skepticism (appeared in Nature Human Behaviour). His broader goal is to improve public understanding of climate change. He is the recipient of the 2022 Google Cloud Climate Innovation Challenge and the Postdoctoral Alan Turing Enrichment Award. His research has appeared in TIME, WIRED, CNN, and several other prominent media outlets (More info).
Ramit publishes extensively on solving society's wicked problems (Google Scholar). He has a background in electrical engineering and sustainable development and an MPhil-PhD as a Gates scholar from the University of Cambridge.
Research
- Computational Social Science for climate action and sustainability
- Climate justice and Social tipping points
- Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT) and human-in-the-loop AI
- Polarization and misinformation
- Data science, design thinking and public policy
I share affiliations with multiple research units across Cambridge and Caltech for collaborative work. It includes the Energy Policy Research Group (CJBS), Bennett Institute of Public Policy (POLIS), Centre for Climate Repair (Engineering/DAMPT), Cambridge Social Decision-making Lab (Psychology), Centre for Natural Materials Innovation (Architecture) and Alvarez's Group (Caltech HSS).
Teaching
- MPhil in Technology Policy, Judge Business School (2022 - Present)
- Fundamentals of Machine Learning and Policy Analysis Role Play, Bennett Institute of Public Policy (2021 - Present)
- Computational Modelling and Environmental Design (Y2 - Architecture) (2020 - Present)
- Sustainability Leadership in Climate Action, CISL (2022 - Present)
- MSc. in Energy and Society, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford (2020 - Present)
- Engineering and Public Policy (4th Year Engineering), Carnegie Mellon University, USA (2020 - Present)
Supervisions
- MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development, Department of Engineering
- MSt in AI Ethics and Society, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
- MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies, Department of Architecture (also supervise UG students)
- Summer internship, Centre for Climate Repair, Department of Engineering
- Volunteer supervisor, International Solar Energy Alliance
Professional Activities
- Director: Cambridge Collective Intelligence & Design Group
- Co-founder of a climate tech startup - unitmode
- Working group lead on climate change- United Nations Environment Program
Publications
Showing selected papers. A full list of publications can be referred to here: https://camcid.github.io/publications.html
- Bardhan, R., Debnath, R., and Mukherjee, B. (2023). Factor in gender to beat the heat in impoverished settlements, Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02632-3
- Debnath, R., Creutzig, F., Sovacool, B.K., and Shuckburgh, E. (2023). Harnessing human and machine intelligence for planetary-level climate action, npj Climate Action, Nature Portfolio. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-023-00056-3
- Debnath, R., Bardhan, R., and Bell, M.L., (2023) Lethal heatwaves are challenging India’s sustainable development, PLOS Climate, https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000156
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Debnath, R., Reiner, D. M., Sovacool, B. K., Müller-Hansen, F., Repke, T., Alvarez, R. M., & Fitzgerald, S. D. (2023). Conspiracy spillovers and geoengineering. iScience, Cell Press, 106166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.106166
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Debnath, R., van der Linden, S., Sovacool, BK, and Alvarez, RM (2023) Facilitating system-level behavioral climate action using computational social science. Nature Human Behaviour, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01527-7
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Debnath, R., Bardhan, R., Shah, D.U., Mohaddes, K., Ramage, M.H., Alvarez, RM., and Sovacool, BK (2022) Social media enables people-centric climate action in the hard-to-decarbonise building sector. Scientific Reports, Nature Publishing https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-23624-9
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Peng, Z., Debnath, R., Bardhan, R., and Steemers, K., (2022) Machine learning-based evaluation of dynamic thermal-tempering performance and thermal diversity for 107 Cambridge courtyards. Sustainable Cities and Society, Elsevier, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2022.104275
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Debnath, R., Bardhan, R., Misra, A., Hong, T., Vida, R., Ramage, M.H. (2022) Lockdown impacts on residential electricity demand in India: A data-driven and non-intrusive load monitoring study using Gaussian mixture models. Energy Policy, Elsevier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2022.112886
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Debnath, R., Bardhan, R., Reiner, D. M., and Miller, JR (2021) Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental dimensions of electric vehicle adoption in the United States: A social-media interaction analysis. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2021.111707
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Debnath R. and Bardhan R., (2020) India nudges to contain COVID-19 pandemic: a reactive public policy analysis using machine-learning based topic modelling, PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238972
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Debnath, R., Darby, S., Bardhan, R., Mohaddes, K., & Sunikka-Blank, M. (2020). Grounded reality meets machine learning: A deep-narrative analysis framework for energy policy research. Energy Research & Social Science, Elsevier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101704
