Shubhankar P. Patankar
Hello! I am a Ph.D. candidate at the intersection of cognitive science and AI with Dani S. Bassett at the University of Pennsylvania, where I also earned a Master’s degree in robotics. Before Penn, I studied mechanical engineering and Russian at the University of California, Davis.
Some projects I’ve worked on in graduate school include:
- Adapting theories of human curiosity as reinforcement learning rewards for agents exploring graph-structured environments [1],
- Evaluating how humans exhibit curiosity on Wikipedia [2], and
- Understanding the controllability properties of structural brain networks [3].
More recently, I was a machine learning intern at Tesla, working on time-series and vision problems for the 4680 cell. I’ve also been an intern at General Motors, applying graph neural networks for predictive maintenance and anomaly detection in vehicle manufacturing.
Outside of science and engineering, some of my interests include history, playing Age of Empires II, and supporting Liverpool Football Club.