About Mapleforge Labs
Why “Mapleforge”?
A forge is where raw material becomes something useful under skilled hands. A maple is patient growth — deep roots, renewed every season. Mapleforge Labs LLC exists where those two meet: craft applied to growth. We help individuals and businesses turn AI from a subscription they pay for into capability they actually own — and we run a project community where new ideas get forged the same way: discussed in the open, tested against evidence, and, for selected projects, sponsored toward academic publication.
What we do
Mapleforge Labs is an AI application consultancy offering five services: AI Application Solutions, AI Strategy & Implementation Plans, AI Training, Legacy System Integration, and AI Privacy & Security reviews. The consultancy funds the community: company-posted project ideas and past conference projects are discussed in our forum, members post their own projects for feedback, and selected projects receive sponsorship — AI tool fees, token costs, publication fees — decided project-by-project and developed with their authors toward publication.
The founder
Dr. Gary Yu Zhao is an Assistant Professor (tenure track) in the School of Computer Science & Information Systems at Northwest Missouri State University, where he has served since 2023. He is the student advisor for the university's Applied AI minor and teaches Introduction to Applied AI every semester, alongside courses such as Systems Analysis & Design.
He earned his Ph.D. in Information Systems from Dakota State University (2024), with doctoral research on natural language processing — extracting knowledge from IT helpdesk transcripts. His current research program covers AI agents inside learning management systems, LLM token optimization, trustworthy and secure agentic AI, and how AI is reshaping the systems analysis & design curriculum.
Before academia, Dr. Zhao spent four years as a Software/Programming Specialist at Northwest Missouri State, leading the development of 22 web and mobile applications, including Canvas LMS customizations used across the university. Earlier, he co-founded a Canadian technology company (2004–2017) building residence-community CCTV/IP camera surveillance systems, and held telecom and data roles in China. That mix — research, production software, and systems that had to work in the real world — is the practice Mapleforge Labs sells.
Selected work
- AI Reshapes Systems Analysis & Design (ISCAP Conference 2026) — with Cindy Tu and Joni Adkins: a case study of AI in the ISAD curriculum, 43 students, client-evaluated prototypes, and survey evidence on trust and verification.
- BareBot: an LMS-based domain AI agent study — 54 participants, a 14-task evaluation protocol; 86.2% task success alongside a 19.4% incorrect-information rate, and measured trust change. Paper in preparation (ITiCSE 2027 target).
- Token-optimization literature program — 232 papers screened across ACM, ACL Anthology, arXiv, and ScienceDirect against a two-criterion filter (a concrete optimization artifact, experimentally evaluated) — now a community project in our forum.
How we work
Plain claims, real numbers, written deliverables. We publish our prices, we say “don't build yet” when that's the honest answer, and the community sponsorship terms are public — because trust is the product. Questions? Email mapleforgelabs@gmail.com or use the contact page.