International

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.

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. 

The University of Waterloo, in partnership with the Balsillie School of International Affairs, the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, and Future Cities Institute will host an international workshop to convene and build the capacities of the global climate city data governance community. This two-day in-person workshop will be held on April 21-22, 2025 at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada.

Join us for a WICI Webinar on Wednesday, January 6th @ 2 p.m. via Webex.

Complexity science and related methods draw from multiple theories and disciplines. As a result, the application of complexity science and methods can potentially help build bridges across disciplines. However, the use of different language and concepts across disciplines can also act as a barrier to achieving transdisciplinary collaborations to address complex challenges.

Managing air pollution, toxic substances, and climate change is a complex, linked sustainability challenge. To better inform efforts to address these issues, we need to understand how policies to address emissions translate into societal benefits. In this talk, Dr. Selin will present work from her research group, using a systems approach to better understand air pollutants such as particulate matter, ozone, and mercury.

WICI workshop: Leveraging systems approaches to improve human & planetary health

View slides from Yacov Haimes' Presentation: "Understanding, Modeling, and Managaing Interdependent Complex Systems of Systems". 

A joint seminar sponsored by Waterloo Institute for Complexity & Innovation [WICI] and the Department of Systems Design Engineering.

Join us for Dr. Ricard Solé's WICI Talk: "Synthetic evolutionary transitions: from cells to brains and ecosystems"

Dr. Ricard Solé is a Professor, at the Complex Systems Lab, in Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.   He will present on April 24th, 2018, in DC 1302 at 2:00 p.m.

Abstract:  Evolution is marked by well-defined events involving profound innovations