Francesca Zaffora Blando

Welcome!

I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. I specialize in logic, formal epistemology, and the philosophy of science—in particular, the philosophy of probability and induction.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems at Stanford University in the summer of 2020. Before that, I completed an M.Sc. in Logic at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, as well as an M.A. in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

Most of my work is devoted to showing that the theory of algorithmic randomness—a branch of computability theory—can be fruitfully applied to shed light on the foundations of inductive learning. Algorithmic randomness provides a mathematical analysis of the notion of a sequence displaying no algorithmically detectable patterns or regularities. I’m particularly interested in the effects of algorithmic randomness, when taken to be a property of data streams, on the learning performance of computationally limited agents.

If you’d like to get in touch, I can be reached at fzaffora◊andrew.cmu.edu by replacing ◊ with @.

(A note on my name: “Zaffora” is not my middle name; my first name is “Francesca” and my last name is “Zaffora Blando”.)