Amparo Alonso Betanzos (born October 10, 1961 in Vigo, Pontevedra, Spain) is a Spanish and Galician chemical engineer, computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and university professor.^[11,5,14] Her academic affiliations include the University of A Coruña (UDC) and the Medical College of Georgia, although German Wikipedia notes her as a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Santiago de Compostela (UDC).^[1,5,14,32] She serves as the coordinator of the LIDIA research group (Laboratory for R&D in Artificial Intelligence) at the Faculty of Computer Science and the Research Center in ICT (CITIC).^[1,5,14,32] She served as the president of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA), with sources reporting her tenure as either 2013 to 2021 or the 2016–2017 biennium.^{[1,11,5,14,29,32]}

In 1988, she completed her doctoral thesis titled "Foetos: an expert system for the diagnosis, prognosis and therapy of fetal status". Her research focuses on the development and application of artificial intelligence techniques across various fields, as well as on machine learning and Big Data techniques. She was awarded a grant in the first international edition of the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Program (in 1998), making her the first Spanish recipient in the program's 17-year history, and she also received the Galicia ICT Award in 2004.^[11]

Betanzos completed her chemistry studies specializing in industrial chemistry in 1984 and received her doctorate in physics in 1988 from the University of Santiago de Compostela, where she focused her research on the field of biomedical informatics. She then conducted research until 1990 at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, where she worked on the development of expert systems for medical applications, particularly dealing with prenatal monitoring. Subsequently, she concentrated her scientific work on applications of artificial intelligence in diverse areas such as environment, health, and Industry 4.0, as well as on advances in machine learning algorithms. In these areas, she continued working as a university professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of A Coruña (UDC) from 2002 onward, where she has been the coordinator of the LIDIA group (R&D Laboratory in Artificial Intelligence) since 1990.^[3] This group belongs to the Research Center in Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC), which combines teaching and research work. In 2022, she became a visiting professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.^[6]

From 2013 to 2021, she served as president of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA). She was a member of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) working group of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MINCIU), which participated in drafting the Spanish strategy in the field of AI in 2018. She is a member of CAIA, a member of the government advisory commission for AI since 2020, and a member of the Spanish Research Ethics Committee since 2023. Since October 2023, she has been a corresponding academician of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Spain (Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales).^[4,5,7] She is also a Senior Member of IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery. Betanzos has published over 11 book chapters and over 200 articles in journals and at international conferences, with research interests including decision making, data science, machine learning, and feature selection in large datasets.^[8]

Alonso Betanzos studied Chemical Engineering according to Spanish and Basque sources, while French and Galician sources state she graduated in Chemistry at the University of Santiago de Compostela.^[33] She also completed studies at the Universidade da Coruña and the Universidade de Vigo, and holds a PhD in Physics.^[33,11] She arrived at information and communications technology through data application. She focused her thesis on biomedical computing, studying the application of computer techniques in medicine and clinical practice, specifically antenatal monitoring. She was drawn to this topic because it was related to women, represented a novel research area, and offered an interdisciplinary approach collaborating with professionals from other fields. She subsequently continued her research in clinical computing.^[1,15]

In 1988, she completed her doctoral thesis, "Foetos: sistema experto para el diagnóstico, pronostico y terapia del estado fetal", at the University of Santiago de Compostela before undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, though French Wikipedia states she obtained her doctorate at Augusta University in 1988.^[15] At Augusta University's Department of Biomedical Engineering, she began her research experience working in a research center for intelligent systems applied to clinical environments. She was awarded a scholarship in the 16th international edition of the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Program, becoming the third Spanish woman to receive it in the program's 17 years.^[31] Alonso Betanzos continued her work on antenatal monitoring, expanded into the field of intensive care units, and maintained contact with medical personnel across multiple branches, including ICU care and pediatrics.^[24,1,25,30]

Later, she shifted her focus much more to computer science disciplines proper and approached other fields of application. In engineering, she worked on the intelligent maintenance of wind turbines to avoid having professionals climb them periodically to inspect parts, as well as on part maintenance for ships and automobiles.^[1] In the field of social sciences, she developed interdisciplinary research projects to simulate the effects of different environmental policies for environmental conservation and the transition to a greener world. She was drawn to this work because environmental conservation and computing appear distant a priori, but ultimately prove to be closely linked.^[1,34]

She is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of A Coruña, where she leads the Laboratory for the Investigation and Development of Artificial Intelligence (LIDIA).^[11,3] Originally a chemical engineer, her research now focuses on artificial intelligence, specifically its medical applications.^[12] She developed her research career in the Department of Computer Science from 1991 to 2011 as a continuation of her research experience begun in 1988 at the Medical College of Georgia in the United States and in 1989 in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Santiago de Compostela, continuing her research career across all three institutions.^[16,3,19,17]

Notable among her research projects are "Scalable machine learning algorithms: Beyond classification and regression" and "LOCAW (Low-Carbon at Work: Modelling agents and organisations to achieve transition to a low-carbon Europe".^[3,18,26,20] Her record includes 10 publications in the 1990s, 43 in the 2000s (or in the year 2000 according to Basque Wikipedia), and 72 between 2010 and May 2017.^[3,18,26,20] Within the discipline of artificial intelligence, her work disseminates three major thematic blocks: fundamental aspects of artificial intelligence, reasoning schemes and models, and knowledge engineering.^[3,18,26,20] In 2020, she became a member of the newly formed Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation.^[19,18]

In addition to being a professor at the UDC and coordinator of the LIDIA research group, she served as president of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA) from 2013 to 2021 according to Spanish Wikipedia, whereas Basque and Galician sources state that she has been president since 2013.^[20,1] She is also part of the Comité de Sabias of the Cátedra de Feminismos 4.0 at the Universidade de Vigo.

She gives presentations and lectures, attends events, and promotes technological and scientific careers among girls. In 2014, she starred in a short audiovisual piece to encourage girls and young women to consider ICT in their academic and professional future, in which she recounts how she started working in this field.^[20,34,21] In her outreach role, during her talk at the 2015 edition of Big Data Spain, she explained that although artificial intelligence technology has made great advances, people should not be afraid of it, as it simply seeks to reproduce intelligent behaviors in machines and enables obtaining a benefit or helps people make decisions using volumes of data that could not otherwise be handled.^[27,36] She is an advocate, disseminator, and popularizer of big data.^[27]

Among her very numerous publications, book chapters, articles, and conference papers, her popularization books in Spanish and Galician stand out.^[22,28] Her book publications include Knowledge Engineering: Methodological Aspects, authored by Amparo Alonso Betanzos et al. and published in Madrid by Prentice Hall/Pearson/Alhambra in 2004 (ISBN 978-84-2054-192-1). She co-authored Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence with Vicente Moret Bonillo, published by the University of A Coruña (Universidade Da Coruña) with a 1998 edition and a second edition in 2005 (ISBN 978-84-9532-256-2). She also co-authored another edition or volume of Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence with Vicente Moret-Bonillo, Mariano Cabrero-Canosa, Bertha Guijarro-Berdiñas, and Eduardo Mosqueira-Rey, published by the University of A Coruña in 2008 or 2009 (ISBN 978-84-9749-315-4).

Her notable scientific papers include "Filter methods for feature selection–a comparative study" presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007), co-authored with Noelia Sánchez-Maroño and María Tombilla-Sanromán. In 2011, she published "Feature selection and classification in multiple class datasets: An application to KDD Cup 99 dataset" in Expert Systems with Applications (38.5: 5947–5957) with Verónica Bolón-Canedo and Noelia Sánchez-Maroño. Her later review articles with Verónica Bolón-Canedo include "A review of feature selection methods on synthetic data" in Knowledge and Information Systems (34.3 (2013): 483–519), co-authored with Noelia Sánchez-Maroño, and "A review of microarray datasets and applied feature selection methods" in Information Sciences (282 (2014): 111–135).

In 1998, she was awarded the L'Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women In Science in Spain, while Spanish Wikipedia describes it as a fellowship in the L'Oréal UNESCO For Women in Science Program.^[13] On December 28, 2020, she received the María Josefa Wonenburger Planells award, granted by the Junta de Galicia in recognition of the career of relevant Galician female scientists in science and technology.^[9]