Karla Saldana Ochoa
Karla Saldana Ochoa , PhD
Assistant Professor | University of Florida

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, applied to enhance creativity in architectural design and create tools to analyze big data of 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 the integration of Artificial and Human Intelligence to achieve accurate and agile responses to natural disasters, utilizing a multimodal fusion approach for machine learning inference.