Hi, I'm Pranav.


I'm a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford advised by Prof. Ben Seymour (NDCN, IBME) and co-advised by Prof. Ioannis Havoutis (ORI). My background is in engineering and I'm a Neuro-AI researcher working on fundamental problems with applications to safe AI and AI for healthcare. I previously interned at Nvidia where I worked on scalable distributed deep learning.

I'm introverted. I'm a cheerful pessimist. I try to keep thinking about conflicting ideas for longer periods and I find paradoxes deeply interesting. Much of my work is very interdisciplinary and I'm quite comfortable being an outsider in a new field of study. 

I sketch sometimes (digitally) and enjoy electronic music and swimming. I am an Indian native from Pune city and I now live in Oxford, UK. 

You can read my blog here :)

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News 

Research vision

Key motivations in Neuro-AI research are two-fold, using advancements from AI to generate useful hypotheses for neuroscience and using insights from neuroscience to develop better algorithms for AI. With these motivations in mind, my research spans the following three directions: 

Selected Publications

Safe exploration and human reinforcement learning

Optimal composition of multiple values for dopamine-mediated efficient, safe and stable learning

in preparation

Pranav Mahajan, Ben Seymour

Balancing safety and efficiency in human decision making

eLife (2024) and COSYNE conference (2022)

Pranav Mahajan, Shuangyi Tong, Sang Wan Lee, Ben Seymour

Computational neuroscience and neuro-robotics

Neural Associative Skill Memories for safer robotics and modelling human sensorimotor repertoires

5th International Workshop on Active Inference (IWAI 2024) - Spotlight and in preparation

Pranav Mahajan, Mufeng Tang,  T. Ed Li, Ioannis Havoutis, Ben Seymour

Homeostasis After Injury: How Intertwined Inference and Control Underpin Post-Injury Pain and Behaviour

in preparation

Pranav Mahajan, Peter Dayan, Ben Seymour

Enhanced behavioural and neural sensitivity to punishments in chronic pain and fatigue

Brain (2024)

Flavia Mancini, Pranav Mahajan, Anna á V Guttesen, Jakub Onysk, Ingrid Scholtes, Nicholas Shenker, Michael Lee, Ben Seymour

Doing what’s not wanted: Conflict in incentives and misallocation of behavioural control can lead to drug-seeking despite adverse outcomes

Addiction Neuroscience (2023)

Pranav Mahajan, Veeky Baths, Boris Gutkin

Quantifying Synchronization in a Biologically Inspired Neural Network

IEEE- International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2021) and Bernstein Conference (2020)

Pranav Mahajan, Advait Rane, Swapna Sasi, Basabdatta Sen Bhattacharya

AI for healthcare

Quantitative Movement Testing (QMT)

1st Podium Institute Conference (2024) - Spotlight and in preparation

Pranav Mahajan, Amanda Wall, Eoin Kelleher, Anushka Soni, Ben Seymour

Quantitative Cognitive Aversive Testing (QCAT)

Neuromatch Conference (2022)

Pranav Mahajan, Jakub Onysk, Suyi Zhang, Katja Wiech, Flavia Mancini, Ben Seymour

Acoustic and Language Based Deep Learning Approaches for Alzheimer's Dementia Detection From Spontaneous Speech

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (2021)

Pranav Mahajan, Veeky Baths

Want to get in touch? 

Email me at pranav[dot]mahajan[at]ndcn.ox.ac.uk

© Pranav Mahajan