Marcio Fonseca

I have always been fascinated by how intelligence works in humans and machines. After completing my MSc in Cognitive Science at the School of Informatics, I became deeply inspired by the research environment and the wide range of topics available for exploration. Pursuing a PhD felt like a natural next step for me.

Having the opportunity to present my work in places such as Abu Dhabi and Thailand was incredibly rewarding. These experiences allowed me to engage with diverse cultures and connect with passionate researchers from around the world.

Aside from the pandemic, one of the main challenges during the PhD was managing the open-ended nature of research. It allows you to explore exciting and uncharted directions, but not all of them lead to publishable results. Balancing research risks and managing time effectively are crucial skills to develop.

I currently work as a Machine Learning Engineer at the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, where I design ML solutions for the legislative domain, including agentic systems capable of answering queries about legal documents. My work often involves designing human evaluation experiments to assess the usefulness of these solutions—an area in which I gained substantial experience during my PhD.

Being curious and open to different perspectives when solving problems is an essential skill. I’ve always admired how the most experienced researchers tend to be the most open to learning new approaches to challenges they already know well. This is a mindset I continue to apply in both my professional and personal life. On the technical side, my PhD gave me hands-on experience in designing and running experiments using the university’s computing infrastructure. Managing computational resources efficiently, automating experiments, and analyzing results became part of my daily routine. This technical experience has been invaluable in my current role, where it directly informed the procurement and configuration of new equipment to support machine learning workloads within my organization.

An academic researcher is, to a large extent, a communicator. Even if your work is excellent, you still need to make an effort to present it attractively among the hundreds of other publications at poster sessions and conferences. It’s also valuable to collaborate and publish with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh and other institutions.

There are plenty of extracurricular activities and sports clubs at the university that help maintain your well-being during the program. I would highly recommend the sailing club!