Amparo Alonso Betanzos, researcher and Full Professor at CITIC (Centre for Information and Communication Technology Research) of the University of A Coruña, took part in the 2025 edition of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)—one of the world’s leading forums on evolutionary computation and artificial intelligence—organized by ACM SIGEVO in Málaga.

This year’s edition, held in both on-site and virtual formats, featured a keynote presentation by Alonso titled “Rethinking Efficiency in Machine Learning.” In her talk, she addressed the pressing challenges facing AI today in terms of efficiency, transparency, and sustainability. She emphasized that the success of current AI models has largely been driven by the pursuit of higher accuracy—often at the expense of increasing complexity and energy consumption. Projections indicate that if this trajectory continues unchecked, AI could account for over 30% of global energy consumption by 2030.

In response to this critical outlook, Alonso advocated for a paradigm shift towards green and responsible AI—calling for the development of lighter, more energy-efficient, explainable, and sustainable models. She stressed the need to improve data quality, optimize training and inference processes, and design models with a reduced carbon footprint as strategic levers to achieve this goal.

A Globally Recognized Career

Amparo Alonso Betanzos is a Full Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of A Coruña, where she leads the LIDIA Research Group (Laboratory for Research and Development in Artificial Intelligence). She also holds a teaching position in the Department of Psychology at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Trondheim, Norway.

Her research focuses on scalable machine learning models, explainable and trustworthy AI, and Green AI. She served as President of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence from 2013 to 2021 and is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Spanish Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences.

Since 2020, she has been a member of the Spanish Government’s AI Advisory Council, and since 2023, she has served on the Research Ethics Committee of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. In 2018, she also contributed to the development of Spain’s National R&D&I Strategy in Artificial Intelligence.