Raj Deshpande
PhD Student @ Network Science Institute
Raj studies how the motor system organises movement, using higher-order information theory to compare muscle-synergy structure in healthy and stroke participants.
Papers 3
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Nurisso, M., Fernando, J., Deshpande, R., Perotti, A., Marjieh, R., Frankland, S. M., Lewis, R. L., Webb, T. W., Campbell, D., Vaccarino, F., Cohen, J. D., Petri, G.
Intelligent systems must deploy internal representations that are simultaneously structured — to support broad generalization — and selective — to preserve input identity. For any model whose representational similarity between inputs decays with finite semantic resolution, we derive closed-form expressions that pin its probability of correct generalization and identification to a universal Pareto front independent of input space geometry. A minimal ReLU network trained end-to-end reproduces these laws: during learning a resolution boundary self-organizes and empirical trajectories closely follow theoretical curves. The same limits persist in two markedly more complex settings — a convolutional neural network and state-of-the-art vision-language models — confirming that finite-resolution similarity is a fundamental emergent informational constraint.
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Zaffina, L., Monti, C., Poetto, S., Lucas, M., Machado Borges, H. J., Deshpande, R., Tonnesen, P., Gruber, D., Gero, S., Santoro, A., Petri, G.
Predators searching patchy environments must coordinate movements across scales, yet this behavioural hierarchy is not yet technically possible to observe in the deep ocean. Here we show that sperm-whale foraging is organized across two nested levels: directionally persistent search paths and flexible prey-capture tactics. We combine acoustic recordings with reconstructed three-dimensional trajectories from 34 sensor-tag deployments on 20 individual whales in both the eastern Caribbean and the mid-Atlantic. Complete foraging paths exhibit heavy-tailed step lengths and superdiffusive displacement, consistent with Levy-like search. Within these paths, echolocation buzzes resolve into two recurrent acoustic-kinematic tactics, and every sampled whale used both, switching between them within dives. Together, these results reveal a foraging hierarchy in which flexible capture actions unfold within persistent, deliberate large-scale search.
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Carstens, A., Deshpande, R., Esteve, P., Fidelibus, N., Neven, S.L., Ottow, R., Lokamruth, K.R., Rodríguez-Sánchez, P., Santagata, L., Buldú, J.M., Klein, B., Torricelli, M.
Elite football is believed to have evolved in recent years, but systematic evidence for the pace and form of that change is sparse. Drawing on event-level records for 13,067 matches in ten top-tier men's and women's leagues in England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the United States (2020–2025), we quantify match dynamics with two views: conventional performance statistics and pitch-passing networks that track ball movement among a grid of pitch (field) regions. Between 2020 and 2025, average passing volume, pass accuracy, and the percent of passes made under pressure all rose. In general, the largest year-on-year changes occurred in women's competitions. Network measures offer alternative but complementary perspectives on the changing gameplay in recent years, normalized outreach in the pitch passing networks decreased, while the average shortest path lengths increased, indicating a wider ball circulation. Together, these indicators point to a sustained intensification of collective play across contemporary professional football.