Karla Saldaña Ochoa
School of Architecture
Karla Saldana Ochoa is a Tenured Track Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida and a faculty affiliate at the AI2 Center, the Center of Latin American Studies, and FIBER. She directs the AI in Architecture Graduate Certificate program and oversees the SHARE Lab, a research group focused on developing projects that leverage the interaction between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence to enhance creativity in architectural design and to create tools to analyze big data on urban phenomena. At UF, Karla works with Digital Twins (DT), which she defines as intelligent environments, focusing on how this technology is applied across various scales—from buildings to city-wide infrastructure. She collaborates on international projects in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico, and Ecuador. Karla is an Ecuadorian architect and coder with a Master of Advanced Studies in Landscape Architecture and a Ph.D. in Technology in Architecture from ETH Zurich. Her Ph.D. research focused on integrating Artificial and Human Intelligence to deliver accurate, agile responses to natural disasters, using a multimodal fusion approach for machine learning inference.