A collaborative effort between Caltech and the University of Cambridge researchers to solve society’s most pressing challenges.

Research Highlights •

New study in Nature Climate Change: Rich as well as poor underestimates personal carbon footprint

Navigating the challenges of being an interdisciplinary academic

Rising air pollution increases heating demand in colder cities

Motivating collective sustainability behaviour amongst Americans

America's trust in climate research is wobbly

Fossil industry dominates online climate and sustainability communication

Conspiracy theory dominates solar geoengineering conversation online

Computational social sciences can aid in large-scale climate action

Research themes

Computational social sciences

Responsible AI

Climate action

Caltech Members

PI: R. Michael Alvarez

Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science and Co-Director of The Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy at Caltech
Cong Cao

Postdoctoral Instructor in Science, Society, and Public Policy
Danny Ebanks

Visitor in Social Sciences
Ezra Johnson

Undergraduate Student
Beatrice Magistro

Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate in Computational Social Science
Tharani Weerasooriya

Graduate Student in Social Sciences

Cambridge Members

PI: Ramit Debnath

Assistant Professor and Cambridge Zero Fellow, University of Cambridge. Director of Cambridge Collective Intelligence & Design Group and co-director of climaTRACES lab.
Haiming Luo

PhD Candidate (Earth Sciences)
Sharan Maiya

MRes-PhD candidate (AI for Environmental Risk)
Tianzhu Qin

MPhil Candidate (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Cuicheng Zhang

MPhil (Cambridge)
Pengyu Zhang

PhD Candidate (Engineering)

Publications

2024

Cologna, V., ..., Alvarez, R.M., Debnath, R. , ..., Zwann, RA., (2024). Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries. Nature Human Behaviour. (Accepted, in press). Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/6ay7s

Nielsen, K.S., Bauer, J.M., Debnath, R. , Emogor, C.A., Geiger, S.M., Ghai, S., Gwozdz, W., and Hahnel, U.J.J., (2024), Underestimation of personal carbon footprint inequality in four diverse countries . Nature Climate Change, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02130-y

Debnath, R. (2024). Communicating my value. Science, AAAS. Vol 385, Issue 6710. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ziylh46

Mede, N., ..., Alvarez, R.M., Debnath, R. , ..., Zwann, RA., (2024). Perceptions of Science, Science Communication, and Climate Change Attitudes in 67 Countries The TISP Dataset. Scientific Data, Nature Portfolio. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.12813.10721 (Accepted, in press)

Debnath, R., and Lin, YT., (2024). A better count of heat-related deaths needed to help the vulnerable, Nature India. https://doi.org/10.1038/d44151-024-00084-w

Magistro, B., Abramson, C., Ebanks, D., Debnath, R., and Alvarez, R.M. (2024). Identifying American climate change free riders and motivating sustainable behavior, Scientific Reports, Nature Portfolio. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-57042-w

Kann, C., Ebanks, D., Morrier, J., & Alvarez, R. M. (2024). Persuadable voters decided the 2022 midterm: Abortion rights and issues-based frameworks for studying election outcomes. Plos one. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294047

Alvarez, R. M., & Morrier, J. (2024). Issue Responsiveness in Canadian Politics: Are Parties Responsive to the Public Salience of Climate Change in the Question Period?. Political Research Quarterly. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10659129231194270

Kocielnik, R., Li, Z., Kann, C., Sambrano, D., Morrier, J., Linegar, M., ... & Alvarez, R. M. (2024). Challenges in moderating disruptive player behavior in online competitive action games. Frontiers in Computer Science. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2024.1283735

Debnath, R., Zhang, P., Qin, T., Alvarez, R.M., and Fitzgerald, S.D.(2024). Deciphering public attention to geoengineering and climate issues using machine learning and dynamic analysis. (Preprint) https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07010

Cao, C., Debnath, R., and Alvarez, R.M.(2024). Physics-based deep learning reveals rising heating demand heightens air pollution in Norwegian cities. (Preprint) https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04716

2023

Linegar, M., Kocielnik, R., & Alvarez, R. M. (2023). Large language models and political science. Frontiers in Political Science. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2023.1257092

Debnath, R., Ebanks, D., Roulet, T., Mohaddes, K. and Alvarez, R.M. (2023). Do fossil fuel firms reframe online climate and sustainability communication? A data-driven analysis, npj Climate Action, Nature Portfolio https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-023-00086-x

Alvarez, R.M., Debnath, R., and Ebanks, D. (2023). Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change, PLOS Climate https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000147

Debnath, R., Reiner, D. M., Sovacool, B. K., Müller-Hansen, F., Repke, T., Alvarez, R. M., and Fitzgerald, S. D. (2023). Conspiracy spillovers and geoengineering. iScience, Cell Press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.106166

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

Kann, C., Hashash, S., Steinert-Threlkeld, Z., & Alvarez, R. M. (2023). Collective identity in collective action: evidence from the 2020 summer BLM protests. Frontiers in Political Science. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2023.1185633

Müller-Hansen, F., Repke, T., Baum, C.M., Brutschin, E., Callaghan, M.W., Debnath, R., Lamb, W.L., Low, S., Lück, S., Roberts, C., Sovacool, B.K., Minx, J.C. (2023). Attention, sentiments and emotions towards emerging climate technologies on Twitter, Global Environmental Change, Elsevier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102765

Debnath, R., Creutzig, F., Sovacool, B.K., and Shuckburgh, E. (2023). Harnessing human and machine intelligence for planetary scale climate action, npj Climate Action, Nature portfolio, https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-023-00056-3

Ali, M., Couto, L.C., Unsworth, S., and Debnath, R. (2023). Bridging the divide in energy policy research: Empirical evidence from global collaborative networks. Energy Policy,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113380

Kocielnik, R., Prabhumoye, S., Zhang, V., Alvarez, R. M., & Anandkumar, A. (2023). Autobiastest: Controllable sentence generation for automated and open-ended social bias testing in language models. arXiv (preprint). https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07371

2022

Debnath, R., Bardhan, R., Shah, D.U., Mohaddes, K., Ramage, M.H., Alvarez, RM., and Sovacool, B.K. (2022) Social media enables people-centric climate action in the hard-to-decarbonise building sector. Scientific Reports, Nature Portfolio, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-23624-9