University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is Canada’s leading university for computer science, and it has a strong claim on one of the most important moments in recent computing history. It was here, in 2012, that a neural network called AlexNet, built by Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever under Geoffrey Hinton, won a major image-recognition contest by a wide margin and set off the deep learning revolution that now drives modern artificial intelligence.

That machine learning strength sits within a large, broad department that is respected across the whole field, from theory and systems to graphics and computational biology. Founded in 1827, Toronto is a large public research university, and its scale gives its computer science programme both depth and range.

The city around it has become a major artificial intelligence hub, partly because of the university’s work, which gives students close access to research labs and a growing technology industry.