
nfonseca@turing.ac.uk | nayara.focs@gmail.com
The Alan Turing Institute
The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London​
[CV]
Events/News
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May/2025: I'm excited to share that I'm joining The Alan Turing Institute as Senior Research Associate in Fundamental Research in AI for Physical Systems!
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April/2025: AI agents debating scientific strategy: starting with particle physics. Check out my prototype on GitHub.
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19-21 March/2025: I will participate in the Physics for AI workshop at the Mathematical Institute here in Oxford.
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9-15 December/2024: I'm attending NeurIPS'24 in Vancouver. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to meet up!
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19 November/2024: I will participate in the Physics for AI and AI for Physics: Landscaping Workshop at the Institute of Physics, London. See the community report [here].
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1 November/2024: I'm giving a talk at the AI Security Reading Group, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.
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28-29 October/2024: I'm presenting a poster at the 'Beyond the symbols vs signals debate' meeting at The Royal Society (London).
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September/2024: Our paper, An exactly solvable model for emergence and scaling laws, was accepted at NeurIPS 2024!

RESEARCH
My current work focuses on understanding fundamental phenomena in artificial intelligence. My approach, which I call 'Phenomenology of Deep Learning', draws from my background in particle physics phenomenology to combine rigorous theoretical analysis with empirical evidence. For instance, see [here] for our work on emergence and scaling laws and [here] for our work on double descent and online/offline correspondence in similarity learning.
Previously, I explored the construction of models to explain small- and large-scale phenomena in the universe. I worked on the interplay between particle physics theory and cosmology, learning from the early universe how to build and interpret our models of particle physics. See [here] for all publications.

ABOUT ME
I'm a Senior Research Associate at The Alan Turing Institute, where I work on Fundamental Research in AI. Before joining Turing, I was a Research Fellow at Oxford Physics. Previously, I was at IBM Research, ICTP in Trieste, DESY Theory Group in Hamburg, CTP at MIT, University of São Paulo, and University of Campinas.
For more details, please see my [CV].