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Research Fellow
Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford
UKRI Horizon Europe Guarantee Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship
Project: Phenomenology of Deep Learning

nayara.fonsecadesa@physics.ox.ac.uk | nayara.focs@gmail.com

[Publications]       [CV] 

Events/News

  • 19-21 March/2025: I will participate in the Physics for AI workshop at the Mathematical Institute here in Oxford.
     

  • 9-15 December/2024: I'm attending NeurIPS'24 in Vancouver. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to meet up!
     

  • 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].
     

  • 1 November/2024: I'm giving a talk at the AI Security Reading Group, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.
     

  • 28-29 October/2024: I'm presenting a poster at the 'Beyond the symbols vs signals debate' meeting at The Royal Society (London).
     

  • September/2024: Our paper, An exactly solvable model for emergence and scaling laws, was accepted at NeurIPS 2024!
     

  • March-June/2024: I'm participating in the AI Alignment Course run by BlueDot Impact. Please feel free to reach out if you'd like to exchange ideas or explore potential collaborations!

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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. 

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ABOUT ME

I'm a Research Fellow at Oxford Theoretical Physics, where I'm exploring the interplay between Machine Learning and Physics. I'm hosted at Ard Louis group. Before Oxford, I worked as a Research Scientist at IBM Research UK. Previously, I was at 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].

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