Shubhankar Patankar

• University of Pennsylvania

The human brain displays rich communication dynamics that are thought to be particularly well-reflected in its marked community structure. Yet, the precise relationship between community structure in structural brain networks and the communication dynamics that can emerge therefrom is not well understood. In addition to offering insight into the st...

Intrinsically motivated exploration has proven useful for reinforcement learning, even without additional extrinsic rewards. When the environment is naturally represented as a graph, how to guide exploration best remains an open question. In this work, we propose a novel approach for exploring graph-structured data motivated by two theories of huma...

Theoretical constructs, such as the information gap theory and compression progress theory, seek to explain how humans practice curiosity. According to the former, curiosity is the drive to acquire information missing from our understanding of the world. According to the latter, curiosity is the drive to construct parsimonious mental world models....

Modern science is formally structured around scholarly publication, where scientific knowledge is canonized through citation. Precisely how citations are given and accrued can provide information about the value of discovery, the history of scientific ideas, the structure of fields, and the space or scope of inquiry. Yet parsing this information ha...

Intrinsically motivated information seeking is an expression of curiosity believed to be central to human nature. However, most curiosity research relies on small, Western convenience samples. Here, we analyze a naturalistic population of 482,760 readers using Wikipedia’s mobile app in 14 languages from 50 countries or territories. By measuring the...

Due to the significant role that curiosity plays in our lives, several theoretical constructs, such as the information gap theory and compression progress theory, have sought to explain how we engage in its practice. According to the former, curiosity is the drive to acquire information that is missing from our understanding of the world. According...

The human brain displays rich communication dynamics that are thought to be particularly well-reflected in its marked community structure. Yet, the precise relationship between community structure in structural brain networks and the communication dynamics that can emerge therefrom is not well-understood. In addition to offering insight into the st...