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.

Admissions

Toronto does not admit undergraduates straight into computer science. School-leavers apply to the Faculty of Arts & Science through its Computer Science admission category, which asks for a Grade 12 calculus course and guarantees a place in a computer science program after first year for those who clear the minimum marks. Students admitted under other categories can still switch in, but they compete for a program of study by passing the first-year courses CSC148 and CSC165 (or CSC240); in practice recent entrants to the major have carried marks in the A to A+ range, so the internal bar is high even once you are on campus.