About

Biography

Dr. Ritwik Banerjee is a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and director of the Social & Computational Intelligence Research (SCIRE) group. His research is in natural language processing and computational social science, centered on how information and narratives, ranging from factually accurate to artfully distorted, moves through language and online communities.

His work develops computational methods to identify information distortion, model how it spreads, and analyze the pragmatics of discourse and argumentation, combining computational linguistics with causal inference, temporal and diffusion modeling, and theories of argumentation. He has applied these methods across several domains: the spread of health-related information, cross-national framing of armed conflict in the news, and privacy and regulatory compliance in clinical and user data. A recurring theme across this work is that the form of language — its structure, pragmatics, and rhetorical strategy — carries the most important signals.

He leads an externally funded research program, serving as Principal Investigator on awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Broadridge Financial Solutions, and the Society for Family Planning, with roughly $1.08M in total research funding. Current projects include belief-driven information distortion across social media, and a framework for investigating mobile data lifecycles against privacy laws across multiple jurisdictions.

Banerjee has advised three Ph.D. students to completion, and is actively advising two more. His advisee Ph.D. students went to accept roles as Research Scientist at Meta, Researcher at Boeing AI, and on the Tenure-Track Faculty at Nankai University. He has also advised 50+ M.S. and undergraduate researchers. He designs and teaches courses spanning data structures, programming abstractions, principles of programming languages, machine learning, and natural language processing; and has taught a Ph.D. research practicum for an NSF Research Traineeship Program on detecting and addressing bias in data, humans, and institutions.

Banerjee earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2015, and holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the Chennai Mathematical Institute in India.

Professional Standing & Service

• Area Chair: ACL Rolling Review (2025)

• Panelist, U.S. National Science Foundation (2020, 2024)

• Panelist, Joint NSF–NIH workshop on Smart and Connected Health (2021)

• External Advisory Committee member, NSF Award (2023–2026)

• Scientific / Program Committees: LREC (2026), CLEF CheckThat! (2025), COLING (2025), IEEE CogMI, AAAI, ACL, NAACL, and others

• Guest Editor, MDPI Information, Special Issue on Natural Language Argumentation (2024)

• Journal reviewing: IEEE Security & Privacy, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

Awards

• Best Technical Paper, IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2015)

• Best of the Labs Paper, Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2019)

• Computer Science Chair Fellowship, Stony Brook University (2009)

• National Graduate Scholarship, Government of India (2005–2007)

• National Board of Higher Mathematics Scholarship, Government of India (2001–2004)

[ Download CV (PDF) ]