Welcome to Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation!
Visit our "About' section for more information about the Institute. For more about complex systems in general, and how WICI core members are applying complex systems in their work, be sure to watch the short videos on our "What are complex systems" page.
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If you have any general inquiries, please contact us at wici@uwaterloo.ca and we will do our best to assist you or connect you with someone who can.
News
WICI Speaker Series Announced
The Waterloo Institute for Complexity & Innovation (WICI) is proud to launch our 2025 Speaker Series with two thought-provoking events.
Join us for two inspiring talks on complexity, governance, AI, and relational futures featuring:.
Dr. Rik Logtenburg, June 26, 2:30 pm,
and
Dr. Vanessa Andreotti, June 27, 10:30 am.
More information and registration details can be found on our events page.
WICI leadership announcement
Updates to leadership and staff member of WICI.
Call for Students to Join Agent-Based Modelling Working Group
WICI student member Alex Petric is coordinating an on-campus working group for Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) for the Winter 2025 term.
Events
Dr. Rik Logtenberg, June 26, 2025
We are excited to announce that a Dr. Rik Logtenburg will be joining us for a special event you won't want to miss! Register online to stay updated.
🎤Workshop: The Futures We Can Build: Coordinating Complexity Across Canada
📅 Date: June 26, 2025
🕒 Time: 2:30 pm
📍Location: United College of University of Waterloo, Room 164 (Greenhouse) | 190 Westmount Road N. , Waterloo, ON | (formerly St. Paul's College)
Stay tuned for more details soon—mark your calendars now!
Canada is at a crossroads—facing simultaneous crises in climate resilience, economic productivity, housing affordability, and institutional effectiveness. Traditional approaches often fragment efforts, limiting their impact.
How can we coordinate complexity, scale effective solutions, and catalyze systemic innovation across sectors, scales, and communities?
Join Rik Logtenberg, Director of CanAdapt, for an inspiring talk and interactive workshop demonstrating how complexity science, AI, and community-led systems thinking can accelerate Canada’s transition.
In this session, you’ll:
- Learn how practical tools—systems mapping, adaptive governance frameworks, and AI-powered decision-support platforms—transform isolated efforts into coordinated action.
- Engage in hands-on mapping exercises and collaborative discussions.
- Identify leverage points and actionable pathways to scale resilient infrastructure and innovative governance.
Leave empowered, connected, and ready to build the shared futures Canada urgently needs.
Meta-Relational AI in a Time of Saturation, Destabilization, and Reckoning
Prof. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, is a distinguished educator, researcher, and author who recently has delved into the concept of "Meta-Relational AI," advocating for a perspective that views artificial intelligence not merely as a tool but as a participant in the web of life.
As we meet this moment of social and ecological systemic unraveling, artificial intelligence stands as both a mirror and a symptom of modernity’s habits: control, mastery, and separation. This talk invites a different question: what is AI revealing about us, and what is collapsing through that revelation?
Drawing on decades of work in educational, decolonial, and post-representational relational inquiry, Vanessa Andreotti explores how Large Language Models (LLMs), when engaged from within an ontological shift (from epistemic regression to relational inference), rather than the logic of optimization, can become something else: a co-witness to social, ecological, and psychological destabilization, and a speculative co-weaver of life-affirming and Earth-aligned relationalities.
📅Date: June 27, 2025
🕒Time: 10:30 am
📍Location: United College of University of Waterloo, Room 164 (Greenhouse) | 190 Westmount Road N. , Waterloo, ON | (formerly St. Paul's College)
Please register using the online event form in order to stay up to date with more information.