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 an object 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”.)

News & Events

Progic 2025: The Twelfth Workshop on Combining Probability and Logic

Special focus: Theoretical Approaches to Learning and Learnability

Department of Philosophy and Center for Formal Epistemology, Carnegie Mellon University, April 3-5, 2025

Inaugural CMU Philosophy Halloween Talk

Wednesday, October 30, 2024, 5-6:30pm, Baker Hall A51, Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh Formal Epistemology Workshop

Center for Formal Epistemology, Carnegie Mellon University

Workshop on Chance, Credence, Computation

Center for Formal Epistemology, Carnegie Mellon University, September 21-22, 2024