About
The Machine Learning Group is a community of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and students in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. For nearly four decades, researchers here have helped shape the field, and we continue to work on its hardest open questions.
To advance the foundations of machine learning and deep learning, and to train the next generation of students who will carry the field forward. We encourage students to work on problems that pique their curiosity, driven by scientific merit, and we publish what we find.
Modern deep learning was substantially worked out here, beginning when Geoffrey Hinton arrived in 1987 and neural networks were an unfashionable bet. Four decades later, our alumni lead research groups and companies around the world.
Our faculty hold national and international recognition, including the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize, Canada Research Chairs, and CIFAR AI Chairs. Our research appears at top venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR, garnering numerous best paper awards.
Our heritage
For nearly four decades, the University of Toronto has been at the centre of the field's most consequential breakthroughs.
1987
Hinton arrives in the Department of Computer Science, establishing Toronto as a home for neural network research at a time when the approach was deeply out of fashion.
2004
Hinton leads the CIFAR program on Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception, gathering the small community that would bring deep learning back into the mainstream.
2006
“A fast learning algorithm for deep belief nets” (Hinton, Osindero & Teh) shows how to train deep networks effectively, reigniting the field.
2012
Hinton’s group introduces dropout, a simple regularization technique that randomly drops units during training to prevent overfitting. It quickly becomes standard practice across deep learning.
2012
Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton roughly halve the state-of-the-art error rate on the ImageNet challenge — a watershed moment for deep learning in computer vision.
2013
Google acquires DNNresearch, the U of T spin-out founded by Hinton and his students, carrying the lab's ideas into industry at scale.
2014
Jimmy Ba, then a U of T graduate student and now a faculty member in the group, co-develops Adam with Diederik Kingma — an optimizer that becomes a default for training deep networks.
2015
Professor Brendan Frey founds Deep Genomics, applying machine learning to genetic medicine and showing the reach of U of T's research beyond computer vision and language.
2015
U of T graduate Ilya Sutskever — who trained here under Geoffrey Hinton — becomes a co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, extending Toronto's influence across the field.
2016
Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo beats Go champion Lee Sedol. Chris Maddison (then a U of T graduate student, now a faculty member) helped get the project off the ground as an intern, building the neural networks that learned to predict an expert’s next move, and is third author of the Nature paper describing AlphaGo.
2017
The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence is founded in Toronto, with Hinton as chief scientific advisor, anchoring the city as a global AI hub.
2018
Hinton receives the ACM A.M. Turing Award alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for the conceptual and engineering breakthroughs behind deep neural networks.
2018
NVIDIA establishes an AI research lab in Toronto led by Professor Sanja Fidler, deepening the city's ties between academic and industrial computer-vision research.
2019
U of T alumni Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang found Cohere in Toronto, building large language models for enterprise.
2021
Professor Raquel Urtasun founds Waabi, a Toronto company advancing autonomous driving with an AI-first approach born out of her work at the university.
2023
U of T PhDs Yuhuai Wu and Guodong Zhang, together with Professor Jimmy Ba, are among the co-founders of xAI.
2024
Hinton shares the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
Where we are
The group is based in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology in the heart of the St. George campus at the University of Toronto and in close proximity to the Vector Institute. We’re a short streetcar or subway ride from everything that Toronto has to offer.