Pranshu Malik

I am a PhD student at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, currently undertaking rotations in research units supervised by Greg Stephens, Kenji Doya, and Tom Froese. Previously, I did a master's (by research) in neuroscience at Western University in the Sensorimotor Superlab. Before that I was an undergrad at the University of Toronto where I studied electrical engineering with a focus on control systems and robotics.

My primary research interests lie at the confluence of robotics, neuroscience, and cognitive science. A driving question for me is how actions and their perception are computed and represented, and how we can reliably, or at least plausibly, align our conceptions and artificial formulations of control more closely with reality — to not only enable more robust and easily generalizable robotic control but also to gain an integrative understanding of biological sensorimotor control, and in the process perhaps uncover some core principles of the mind. A few directions that I am currently exploring include:

composition rules and abstractions in dynamical closed-loop control

constraints and timescales in feedforward-feedback control

stochastic continual adaptation schemes under noisy conditions

self- and knowledge-boundaries in embodied agents.

Research

The Nature of Reflexes in Online Planning and Control [MSc Thesis]
Pranshu Malik

thesis

Through careful experiments and analyses, minimal temporal separation between feedback and voluntary control was observed, highlighting their tight coupling. Interestingly, both short- and long-latency reflex responses were found to begin updating nearly as quickly as visuomotor response times. Additional nuanced observations indicate a resource- and time-efficient strategy employed in the computation of corrective feedback responses.

Last updated: June 2025.