Ritwik Banerjee
Research Assistant Professor, Computer Science
206 New Computer Science
100 Engineering Drive
Stony Brook University
Dr. Banerjee leads the Social & Computational Intelligence Research (SCIRE) Group at the Department of Computer Science in Stony Brook University, where he is also affiliated with the AI Innovation Insitute. His group explores biomedical language understanding and AI-driven healthcare, information integrity, and computational models of natural language discourse and pragmatics. His work has a particular focus on efficient models for pragmatics – designing bechmarks for difficult and overlooked aspects of language understanding, and designing training paradigms that achieve superior results with models 10X-100X smaller than contemporary LLMs. This includes the design of task-specific loss functions and careful manifold analysis for problems like detection of whataboutism in media, cross-genre misinformation detection, clinical expert finding, and distillation of small amounts of target data from noisy backgrounds.
His current research investigates regulatory compliance and violations of end-user privacy in mobile applications (NSF), misinformation in women’s health (Society of Family Planning), and detecting fallacious argumentation in media (AI Innovation Institute). At Stony Brook University, he has mentored three computer science Ph.D. students to completion, with graduates now at Meta (Research Scientist), Boeing AI (NLP Researcher), and Nankai University (Tenure-Track Faculty).
Dr. Banerjee received his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University, where he received the Computer Science Chair Fellowship. His research on patient-centered identification of adverse drug events received the Best Technical Paper Award at IEEE ICHI (2015). He received his M.Sc. in Computer Science and B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science, both from Chennai Mathematical Institute, where he was the recipient of the National Graduate Scholarship and the National Board of Higher Mathematics Scholarship from the Government of India.