Diana Benavides Prado

Profile

Dr. Diana Benavides Prado is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London.

She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Auckland, New Zealand (2019), after completing a Master’s degree in Systems Engineering and Computing at University of Los Andes, Colombia (2012) and a Bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering and Computing at San Martin University, Colombia (2010).

Before joining Queen Mary, Diana held academic and research positions in New Zealand. She was a Lecturer in Computer Science (AI & ML) at The University of Auckland (2023–2025), a Senior Research Fellow at the NAO Institute, The University of Auckland (2021–2023), and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Data Analytics, Auckland University of Technology (2016–2021). Prior to that, she was Research Lead at the Centre for Informatics Research, University of Los Andes, Colombia (2013–2016), and a Research Assistant at the same Centre (2010-2012).

Diana has contributed to numerous projects in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, collaborating with researchers and practitioners in Colombia, Chile, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and, more recently, the UK. She has extensive experience leading and working with teams of researchers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers on both fundamental and applied projects across a wide range of domains.

Her fundamental research interests include transfer learning, continual machine learning, and deep neural networks, with a particular focus on enabling knowledge transfer in increasingly knowledgeable and self-improving continual learning systems. On the applied side, her work focuses on machine learning for social good: she has led the design and implementation of tools that support high-stakes decision-making to safeguard human well-being, and more recently has expanded her interests to applications that advance the protection of animals.

In terms of teaching, she has extensive experience delivering undergraduate and postgraduate courses in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Her teaching portfolio includes both theoretical foundations and practical applications, where she integrates research-led content with hands-on projects. She has supervised numerous student research projects in areas related to AI and machine learning.

Beyond research and teaching, Diana is an active contributor to the international AI community. She has served on program committees for top conferences such as AAAI, IJCAI, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR, and as a reviewer for journals including Transactions of Machine Learning Research. She is also a moderator for arXiv in the Machine Learning category. In addition, she has served in leadership and editorial roles, including Program Chair for the Australasian Conference on Data Science and Machine Learning (AusDM) and editorial board member for journals such as Data Science and Machine Learning (Springer), Data Science and Engineering (Springer), and Neural Computing and Applications (Springer).

Teaching

• ECS663U/ECS7020P Principles of Machine Learning
• Working towards PGCAP

Research

Research Interests:

Continual machine learning, transfer learning, deep neural networks, machine learning for social good.

Publications

JavaException: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal character in query at index 95: http://researchpublications.qmul.ac.uk/publications/GetAllStaffOutputXML.action?staffids=Please see my Google Scholar profile page.&flatXML=Y