Oh man that was an amazing time at UoT. We also got GPU versions of btc mining from that group.
We also had Ethereum be born right around there as well around 2014. I remember the first Ethereum meetups around Queen and Spadina with Vitalik.
But to another posters point. Even though we had the father of deep learning Geoffrey Hinton and lumiaries like Ilya, and Vitalik, we didn't manage to get any real benefit from that.
Wow! By the time I arrived, Hinton was gone. As well as many great professors that started their own companies or were poached by big players (i.e. Sanja-Nvidia). At least I got to learn NN from Jimmy Ba (author of Adam). Now, he's working at xAI.
We also had Ethereum be born right around there as well around 2014. I remember the first Ethereum meetups around Queen and Spadina with Vitalik.
But to another posters point. Even though we had the father of deep learning Geoffrey Hinton and lumiaries like Ilya, and Vitalik, we didn't manage to get any real benefit from that.