Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez

Timeline

1. 2010–2017

   Granada degrees and a double PhD

   She earns an M.Sc. in computer engineering at the University of Granada in 2010 and an M.Sc. in soft computing and intelligent systems there in 2012. In 2015, she completes a double PhD in artificial intelligence at Åbo Akademi University and the University of Granada, with a thesis on semantic and fuzzy modelling for human behaviour recognition in smart spaces, supervised by Johan Lilius and Miguel Delgado Calvo-Flores. She adds a doctoral diploma in innovation and entrepreneurship from EIT Digital in 2017.

2. 2018

   State representation learning

   In 2018, she coauthors State Representation Learning for Control: An Overview with Timothée Lesort, Jean-François Goudou and David Filliat, a survey of methods that learn low-dimensional features for robotics and control. She is also an author of the S-RL Toolbox, which provides environments, data generators, robotic control tasks and metrics for evaluating those methods in reinforcement learning.

3. 2019–2020

   Continual learning at ENSTA

   She spends four years as an assistant professor of AI at ENSTA, Institut Polytechnique Paris, in the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Lab (U2IS), working with INRIA's Flowers team on developmental robotics. In 2019, she coauthors Continual Learning for Robotics with Timothée Lesort, Vincenzo Lomonaco, Andrei Stoian, Davide Maltoni and David Filliat; Information Fusion publishes it in 2020 as a review of continual learning benchmarks and metrics with a framework for comparing robotics and non-robotics approaches.

4. 2019

   A survey of explainable AI

   In October 2019, she is second author of a survey on explainable AI with Alejandro Barredo Arrieta, Javier Del Ser, Francisco Herrera and others. The paper establishes a definition of explainability in machine learning centred on its audience, proposes taxonomies for machine learning and deep learning models, and points toward Responsible AI.

5. 2023

   Connecting the dots in trustworthy AI

   In May 2023, she is first author of Connecting the Dots in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, written with Javier Del Ser, Mark Coeckelbergh, Marcos López de Prado, Enrique Herrera-Viedma and Francisco Herrera. The paper links AI principles, ethics and key requirements to responsible AI systems and regulation.

6. 2024

   A Royal Academy of Engineering prize

   She wins the Juan López de Peñalver prize in the 2024 edition of the Royal Academy of Engineering's Young Researchers Awards, shared with Rubén Tolosana Moranchel. The prize recognises her work applying AI to the recognition of environments and its transfer to industry, and follows earlier Juan de la Cierva and Marie Curie grants.

7. Since May 2024

   Associate professor at Granada

   She is an associate professor at the DaSCI Andalusian Research Institute in data science and computational intelligence, in the University of Granada's Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Her research covers explainable and trustworthy AI, neural-symbolic learning and reasoning, AI for social good and algorithmic auditing, and her work includes cofounding ContinualAI.org and writing the guidelines for the AI Act regulatory sandbox pilot of the Spanish Secretary of State.