People

Ritwik Banerjee
ঋত্বিক বন্দোপাধ্যায়

Principal Investigator

Ritwik Banerjee leads the SCIRE Group in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, where his research develops computational methods for understanding language beyond its literal meaning -- including argumentation, misinformation, and narrative manipulation. His research has been funded by the NSF (the SaTC program and the CNS division), the Society for Family Planning, the AI Innovation Institute, and Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. He has produced over 30 peer-reviewed publications, and advised three PhD students to completion, with alumni now at Meta (2026), Boeing AI (2024), and Nankai University (2021).

Kiera Gross

Ph.D. Student

Kiera Gross is a Ph.D. researcher at the SCIRE Group since 2024. Her research is in computational argumentation, and fallacious reasoning and biases in language models.

Chenlu Wang

Research Scientist, Meta • Ph.D. 2026

Noushin Salek Faramarzi

NLP Researcher, Boeing AI • Ph.D. 2024

Chaoyuan Zuo

Tenure-Track Faculty, Nankai University • Ph.D. 2021

Khiem Phi

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science, Stony Brook University (advisors: I. V. Ramakrishnan and Haibin Ling)

Khiem Phi is a Ph.D. student collaborating with Dr. Banerjee on discourse comprehension and representation. The centerpiece of this work is on the use of attention weights and strategic negative mining to detect narrative acts of deflection and whataboutism on social media.

Dikshya Mohanty

Ph.D. Student, Computer Science, Stony Brook University (advisor: Niranjan Balasubramanian)

Dikshya Mohanty is a Ph.D. student collaborating with Dr. Banerjee on analysis of conflicting information and contested narratives, especially when information silos appear across national and language boundaries.

Weimin Lyu

Applied Scientist, Amazon

Weimin Lyu was a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Informatics at Stony Brook University (advisor: Chao Chen). He collaborated with Wang and Dr. Banerjee in 2024-25 on developing efficient training paradigms for pragmatic language understanding tasks.

Indrakshi Ray

Professor of Computer Science, Colorado State University at Fort Collins

Indrakshi Ray is a Professor of Computer Science at Colorado State University whose research spans cybersecurity, privacy, database systems, and formal methods. She has held visiting appointments at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, and INRIA. Dr. Ray has authored more than 100 refereed publications and has led major international conferences, including ACM SACMAT and IFIP DBSec, in program and general chair roles. A senior member of both IEEE and Association for Computing Machinery, she is widely recognized for her leadership and contributions to the security and database research communities.

Farrukh Koraishy

Professor of Medicine (Nephrology), Stony Brook University

Farrukh M. Koraishy is a Clinical Professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. His research integrates nephrology, clinical informatics, machine learning, and real-world health data analytics, with major projects focused on chronic kidney disease, COVID-19 outcomes, and the relationship between PTSD and kidney disease. Dr. Koraishy has led and collaborated on NIH- and SUNY-funded research initiatives, including work within the NIH National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C).

Lorenzo De Carli

Associate Professor of Electrical & Software Engineering, University of Calgary

Lorenzo De Carli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering at University of Calgary, specializing in network and software security with a focus on building systems that are both secure and usable. His current research spans AI-generated code risks, open-source software supply chain security, IoT security, and ransomware detection. Prior to joining Calgary, he held faculty positions at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Colorado State University.

Ruobing Li

Associate Professor of Communication & Journalism, Stony Brook University

Ruobing Li is an Associate Professor of Communication at Stony Brook University and an affiliated faculty member of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. Her research examines persuasive communication, media effects, and resistance to persuasion across health, environmental, science, and political communication. Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals including Communication Research and Journal of Advertising, Health Communication, and Risk Analysis. Her research has been supported by organizations such as Pfizer, the United States Department of State, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). She is a recipient of the Stony Brook Trustees Faculty Award for her work on vaccine hesitancy and science communication.

H. Andrew Schwartz

Associate Professor of Computer Science & Psychology, Vanderbilt University

H. Andrew Schwartz is an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University and director of the Human Language Analysis Lab (HLAB), where his research focuses on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computational psychology, and mental health analytics. He is also a co-founder of the World Well-Being Project, an interdisciplinary consortium studying large-scale language patterns linked to health, personality, and well-being.
A recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award, his research has been supported by the NIH, NSF, Templeton Foundation, and DARPA, and his work has been featured in more than 100 media outlets.

Shantanu Sharma

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Shantanu Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology whose research lies at the intersection of database systems, security, and privacy, with additional interests in IoT, blockchain technologies, and machine learning for databases. His work on secure and privacy-preserving systems has appeared in premier venues including ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, and IEEE ICDE, and he received a Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications.