About

Hi, I’m Pratyush Tripathy, a PhD student in Geography at UC Santa Barbara. I work on environmental and development problems, and more often in settings where the data don’t exist yet, so a lot of my work is finding ways to generate that data using satellite data and AI models.

My doctoral research focuses on how flooding affects people’s livelihoods in India. I’m also interested in how far AI can be pushed to help answer cause-and-effect questions better than standard methods. I also actively investigate the ways in which AI models tend to fail with geospatial data.

To learn more, please check my Research and Publications.

Recent Work

  • Agrawal, A. & Tripathy, P. (2026). Global Flood Mapper v2: Open-Access Flood Mapping and Exposure Assessment with Sentinel-1 SAR. https://doi.org/10.31223/X54482
  • Tripathy, P., Baylis, K., Wu, K., Watson, J., & Jiang, R. (2026). Zero-shot inference strategies for smallholder (< 0.1 ha) agriculture field delineation with the Segment Anything foundation model. Science of Remote Sensing, 100425. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.srs.2026.100425