Benjamin Rachunok
Ben Rachunok is an assistant professor in the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at NC State University. Broadly, Rachunok works in risk and decision analysis with applications in sustainability and climate change adaptation. More specifically, his research uses methods from simulation and data science to understand how communities respond to natural hazards and climate change. Much of his recent work quantifies the disproportionate impact of climate change and extreme events on low-income or historically disadvantaged communities.
Works (14)
Updated: April 23rd, 2024 05:01
2024 journal article
Predicting and understanding residential water use with interpretable machine learning
ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS, 19(1).
author keywords: drought; water use; water; machine learning
TL;DR:
This work uses post-hoc interpretability methods to examine how drivers of water use interact, focusing on environmental, demographic, physical housing, and utility policy factors, finding all four categories of factors are important for estimating water use with environmental and utility policy factors playing the largest role.
(via Semantic Scholar)
iopscience.iop.org (publisher PDF)
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
6. Clean Water and Sanitation
(OpenAlex)
Sources: ORCID, Web Of Science, NC State University Libraries
Added: January 10, 2024
2023 journal article
Socio-hydrological drought impacts on urban water affordability
Nature Water.
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2023 journal article
Socio-hydrological impacts of rate design on water affordability during drought
ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS, 18(12).
author keywords: drought; water affordability; rate design; socio-hydrology; systems modeling
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
6. Clean Water and Sanitation
(OpenAlex)
Sources: ORCID, Web Of Science, NC State University Libraries
Added: November 15, 2023
2021 journal article
Mapping climate discourse to climate opinion: An approach for augmenting surveys with social media to enhance understandings of climate opinion in the United States
PLOS ONE.
Ed(s): N. Grabar
MeSH headings : Algorithms; Attitude; Climate; Geography; Models, Theoretical; Motivation; Social Media; Surveys and Questionnaires; United States
TL;DR:
A machine learning framework—grounded in statistical learning theory and natural language processing—to augment climate change opinion surveys with social media data is outlined, allowing for discerning the regionally distinct topics and themes that contribute to climate opinions.
(via Semantic Scholar)
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
13. Climate Action
(OpenAlex)
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2021 journal article
Overemphasis on recovery inhibits community transformation and creates resilience traps
Nature Communications.
TL;DR:
It is shown that an overemphasis on recovery without accounting for transformation entrenches ‘resilience traps’–risk factors within a community that are predictive of recovery, but inhibit transformation.
(via Semantic Scholar)
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2021 journal article
Short-term solar irradiance forecasting using convolutional neural networks and cloud imagery
Environmental Research Letters, 16(4), 044045.
author keywords: solar irradiance forecasting; deep learning; convolutional neural network; satellite imagery; remote sensing; renewable energy
TL;DR:
A convolutional global horizontal irradiance prediction model is developed, using Convolutional neural networks and publicly accessible satellite cloud images to ensure efficient harvesting of the solar energy and reliable operation of the grid.
(via Semantic Scholar)
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
7. Affordable and Clean Energy
(OpenAlex)
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2021 journal article
The overlooked environmental footprint of increasing Internet use
Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 167, 105389.
author keywords: Environmental footprint; Data center; Sustainability; Internet; Energy transition; Social responsibility
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2020 journal article
Assessing Global Environmental Sustainability Via an Unsupervised Clustering Framework
Sustainability, 12(2), 563.
author keywords: environmental sustainability; unsupervised learning; self-organized maps; global analysis; environmental performance index; clustering framework
TL;DR:
The proposed framework harnesses a clustering technique known as Self-Organized Maps to group countries based on their characteristic environmental performance metrics and track progression in terms of shifts within clusters over time and supports the hypothesis that the inconsistencies in the EPI calculation can lead to misrepresentations of the relative sustainability of countries over time.
(via Semantic Scholar)
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2020 journal article
Assessment of wind power scenario creation methods for stochastic power systems operations
Applied Energy.
author keywords: Wind power; Scenario creation; Probabilistic scenarios; Scenario evaluation; Stochastic unit commitment; Production cost modeling
TL;DR:
It is shown that the choice of scenario set can significantly impact system operating cost, renewable energy use, and the ability of the system to meet demand, highlighting the need for the use of performance-based assessments for scenario evaluation.
(via Semantic Scholar)
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
7. Affordable and Clean Energy
(OpenAlex)
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2020 journal article
Asymmetrical response of California electricity demand to summer-time temperature variation
Scientific Reports.
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
13. Climate Action
(OpenAlex)
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2020 journal article
Hurricane-induced power outage risk under climate change is primarily driven by the uncertainty in projections of future hurricane frequency
Scientific Reports.
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
13. Climate Action
(OpenAlex)
Source: ORCID
Added: April 22, 2024
2020 journal article
The sensitivity of electric power infrastructure resilience to the spatial distribution of disaster impacts
Reliability Engineering & System Safety.
author keywords: Infrastructure; Resilience; Natural hazards
TL;DR:
It is found that incorporating information about the spatial distribution of disaster impacts has significant implications for estimating infrastructure resilience, and the uncertainty associated with estimated infrastructure resilience metrics to spatially distributed disaster-induced disruptions is much higher than determined by previous methods.
(via Semantic Scholar)
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2019 journal article
Twitter and Disasters: A Social Resilience Fingerprint
IEEE Access, 7, 58495–58506.
author keywords: Data analysis; human computer interaction; resilience; Twitter
TL;DR:
It is shown that major disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes have a unique resilience fingerprint which is consistent between different events of the same type and specifically, hurricanes have a distinct fingerprint which differentiates them from other major events.
(via Semantic Scholar)
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
2018 conference paper
Stochastic Unit Commitment Performance Considering Monte Carlo Wind Power Scenarios
2018 IEEE International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems (PMAPS).
TL;DR:
Examining tradeoffs between computational complexity and quality in stochastic unit commitment using real-world wind power data in the context of an out-of-sample production cost model simulation finds unexpected transitions in computational difficulty at a specific threshold in the number of scenarios.
(via Semantic Scholar)
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
7. Affordable and Clean Energy
(OpenAlex)
Source: ORCID
Added: January 19, 2023
Employment
Updated: January 19th, 2023 15:27
2023 - present
North Carolina State University Raleigh, North Carolina, US
Assistant Professor
Industrial & Systems Engineering
2021 - 2022
Stanford University Stanford, CA, US
Postdoc
Civil & Environmental Engineering
Education
Updated: January 13th, 2021 10:32
2016 - 2020
Purdue University West Lafayette, IN, US
Ph.D.
School of Industrial Engineering
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