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Associate Professor · Department of Computer Science · Federal University of Santa Catarina
Prof. Rafael Luiz Cancian, Dr. Ing., holds a doctorate in Automation and Systems Engineering, a master's degree in Computer Science, a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and postgraduate specializations in Political Science, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, and Financial and Capital Markets.
He has been an associate professor in the Department of Computing at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) for more than 15 years, previously taught in higher education at UNIVALI and IFSC for more than 10 years, and also served for more than a decade as a partner-director of a small consulting company in urban public transportation and information technology.
He has been a member of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) for more than 20 years and a member of the Brazilian Computer Society for about 20 years. His experience spans automation engineering, computer engineering, and computer science, with emphasis on software/hardware integration and systems simulation. His research, outreach, and technological development agenda focuses on biological and biochemical computing, artificial intelligence, system modeling and simulation, cyber-physical systems, and computer organization.
His academic work connects classical computer systems with scientific computing, modeling and simulation, artificial intelligence, and emerging computational interpretations of biological systems. The research agenda is organized around the following areas:
GenESys is a modular and extensible system simulator oriented to discrete-event simulation, time-driven models, stochastic processes, cellular automata, continuous models, statistical analysis, experimental design, and future parallel or distributed simulation support.
Research on simulation models capable of representing unicellular biological systems as target substrates for the physical synthesis of digital circuits, framed as a computational modeling agenda rather than as an operational biological protocol.
Work related to application-directed design automation, design-space exploration, multi-objective optimization, hardware/software platform modeling, and generation of embedded and cyber-physical systems.
Projects include software for teaching and research, web systems for educational planning, virtual 3D environments for institutional activities, investment fund comparison tools, embedded assistive technology prototypes, and historical systems for automation and simulation.
His teaching covers foundational and advanced topics in computer science, computer engineering, systems modeling, and applied software development. Courses and teaching areas include:
His publication record includes complete journal papers, complete conference papers, a book on Moodle and the Virtual Programming Lab, and an international book chapter on parallel real-time systems. Selected publication topics include embedded systems, hardware/software co-design, component-based systems, performance evaluation, real-time scheduling, distributed simulation, cellular automata, Lattice Boltzmann methods, programming education, and bioinformatics.
Selected works include publications in the Journal of Object Technology, Journal of Coastal Research, IEEE venues related to distributed simulation and factory automation, and book material on programming education with Moodle and VPL.
His academic activities include undergraduate and graduate teaching, student supervision, research and technological development projects, extension activities, curriculum-related work, institutional academic service, scientific communication, and the development of educational and research-oriented software tools.
He also works on the organization of academic web infrastructure for his personal academic profile, research communication, BioCompLab-related dissemination, and the public presentation of software, research directions, teaching materials, and selected publications.
His technical profile combines systems engineering, computer architecture, operating systems, embedded systems, modeling and simulation, scientific software engineering, object-oriented development, data analysis, artificial intelligence applied to scientific workflows, and computational approaches to biological systems.
Methodologically, his work emphasizes abstraction, formal and computational modeling, simulation-based reasoning, software/hardware integration, reproducible scientific tooling, responsible use of AI, and careful distinction between implemented systems, research prototypes, conceptual models, and future research directions.