Program

National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan

Chung-Chi Chen is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan, where he leads the Human-Agent Ally Lab. His research explores how natural language processing, large language models, and AI agents can support accountable decision-making in high-stakes domains. In the context of climate and sustainability, his work focuses on transforming corporate commitments into verifiable evidence through multilingual ESG analysis, promise verification, forward-looking statement assessment, and multimodal sustainability compliance auditing. He has led shared tasks on multilingual ESG and corporate promise verification at FinNLP, SemEval, and NTCIR. He is also the founder and Chair of ACL SIG-FinTech and a recipient of the ACM SIGIR Early Career Researcher Award. His broader research examines human-agent collaboration and the societal impacts of AI-mediated communication.

University of Cambridge

Ramit Debnath is an Associate Professor and Executive Director of the Centre for Human-Inspired AI (CHIA) at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on human-centred AI, NLP and computational social science, with the broader aim of understanding global climate risks and ensuring societal benefit. His work spans applications in energy systems, environmental policy, digital misinformation, and climate action. He is the Founding Director of the Collective Intelligence & Design Group and the climaTRACES lab (now Centre for Space, Earth and Energy), as well as Assistant Director of the Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG). A Fellow of Churchill College and a former Gates Cambridge Scholar, Dr Debnath holds visiting academic roles at Caltech and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. His award-winning research regularly appears in top-tier journals and leading AI conferences, directly informing global policy through advisory roles with the UK Government and international research bodies.

Climate Change AI

Dr. Maria João Sousa serves as Executive Director at Climate Change AI (CCAI), a global non-profit that empowers a global community of innovators, practitioners, and decision-makers to accelerate impactful research and deployment at the intersection of climate change and AI. Maria holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal, where her research focused on cooperative aerial robotics and artificial intelligence for wildfire detection and monitoring systems. Maria was nominated for the UN Environment Young Champions of the Earth 2018 Prize for her project on decentralized intelligent sensor networks for fire detection and monitoring. She joined the CCAI core team in 2020, where she has collaborated on and spearheaded several flagship events of the organization such as the Summer School, the workshop series “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning” at leading AI conferences, e.g., ICML 2021, NeurIPS 2021, NeurIPS 2022 and AMLD 2024, and a global Innovation Grants program. She was a PiTech Startup Postdoc at Cornell Tech’s Runway Startup Postdoc Program and the Public Interest Technology Initiative.