Director’s Welcome

Welcome to the Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL) at the University of Central Florida, where excellence in research, integrity, fostering partnerships and collaborations, nurturing talent, and interdisciplinarity are in our DNA.

For most people, thinking of Central Florida evokes images of tourism, entertainment, and white-sand beaches. It is true. Central Florida is a fun place to live. It is also true that Central Florida is an active technology hub in Computer Simulation, Photonics, and Data Sciences. Here, there is a supportive and engaged technology scene with countless technology entrepreneurs, tech startups, incubators, accelerators, and venture capitalist. At the center of this $6 billion/year tech hub is the University of Central Florida, a thriving preeminent research university located in metropolitan Orlando. With more than 66,000 students, UCF is one of the largest universities in the U.S. With research funding of $183 million/year, UCF is home of various groups conducting world-class high-tech research, such as, the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL), the Center for Research in Computer Vision, the Institute for Simulation and Training and the Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL).

The CASL (ˈkasəl) is dedicated to the study of complex, difficult to understand phenomena such as the global social media information and mis-information dynamics, socio-cultural evolution, global economy and innovation ecosystems. Our current funded research projects include: agent-based computational models of information spread and evolution in social media platforms, cognitive cybersecurity prevention, data analytics of student graduation and retention, bot detection in online social networks, big data and deep learning models for fraud detection, lifelong learning for high-tech workforce development in data science and machine learning, deep learning intrapreneurship, innovation and technology entrepreneurship, science and innovation policy, university engagement, and novel architectures for deep learning.

In the name of our faculty, staff and students, I welcome you and invite you to actively participate of our activities as a sponsor of a collaborative research, as a fellow researcher in a collaborative project, as an industry advisor in our various industry boards, as a guest lecturer, or simply stop by to any of our colloquia and get to know about our group and our work.

Go knights!

Ivan Garibay
Director, Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory