Choosing Canada and hoping for a USA-like Computer Science ecosystem is
positive, safer & pressure-free
than hoping for a Canada-like authorization to foreigners by choosing the USA

csrankings.org helps applicants like me to find professors with good research track record who are associated with little-known universities in the USA and even Canada. Spending more time in this site increases my curiosity and excitement towards pursuing a research Master's instead of a project-based Master's.

Prof. Bengio's startup, Microsoft Research and now Google Research! Something big is about to happen and I'm sure it would ripple further. I get biased towards getting into Canada's Computer Science ecosystem.

Phew! Done with all the application processes. Let me start evaluating the prospects of choosing a good Canadian university over a good US university.

I need to find details about the overall tech ecosystem in Canada.

Some of the relatively well-known Canadian companies are Shopify, Hootsuite, FreshBooks, Wattpad, and Flipp. Oh! Zenefits is in Vancouver. Paytm Labs is in Toronto. Amazon has development centers in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa. Similarly, Google has one in Waterloo and the other in Montreal. Apple has one in Vancouver and the other in Ottawa. Microsoft has a Vancouver development center. Blackberry has teams in Ottawa that even focusses on Operating Systems. AMD has a solid presence in Markham. Similarly, Intel, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA has development centers in Toronto region. North, Clearpath Robotics and Otto Motors are in Waterloo. Ecobee and Nanoleaf are in Toronto. D-Wave Systems and Kindred AI are two other cool companies that have their roots in Canada.

One major thing which connects the cities of Quebec, Vancouver, and Edmonton is their thriving Gaming and Entertainment industry. Most of the top rated studios have their development centers in those cities. Some of them are Ubisoft, EA Sports, and Activision. They have their own development centers or function via their subsidiaries like BioWare, Demonware, etc., Also, there are other indie studios like A Thinking Ape and Kabam. To justify the graphics talent which is the core for gaming industry, even Unity and Autodesk have their development centers in Montreal.

Adobe, Corel and Qlik are in Ottawa. Ottawa seems to have lots of companies in Security, Networking, and Semiconductor sectors. Some of the notable ones include Cisco, Juniper Networks, Huawei, Ciena, Analog Devices, Synopsys, Ericsson, Avast, Trend Micro, and Nokia. Ottawa, being a city with federal agencies and institutions, Palantir having their deployment center there should not be a surprise.

Let me find details about more tech employers in Canada from UofT's Applied Computing and SFU's Big Data programs. I see Splunk and Samsung have centers in Vancouver that also has teams focussed on Data Science. Tableau is in Vancouver. Rakuten's Kobo is actually from Toronto. Mozilla has a development center in Toronto. Kira Systems and ROSS Intelligence seem to be cool startups based out of Toronto.

Now I should choose among Arizona State University, The University of Ottawa, and a job offer from Flipkart. I choose the University of Ottawa to try research. Of course I am hoping for other indirect benefits and prospects because of this decision.

During the co-op job hunt for the summer, I found a lot more opportunities within Canada. SAP has development centers in Montreal and Vancouver. Morgan Stanley has a development center in Montreal. Salesforce has development centers in Vancouver, Halifax, Saint John, and Fredericton. TripAdvisor and SurveyMonkey are in Ottawa. Expedia and Hopper are in Montreal. One should definitely consider the opportunities that comes from startups born out of TandemLaunch. Some of my favorites include Sportlogiq, Wrnch AI, Landr, Deeplite and Fluent AI.

I was fortunate to get interviewed by Shopify, TripAdvisor, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Salesforce, FreshBooks, Datalogue, IMRSV Data labs, Stack and Deeplite. Some interviews went well, some did not, I had to withdraw from some. Many other different incidents also occured.

It's time for the fall co-op job hunt. I discovered even more opportunities and I was fortunate to get interviewed by Shopify, Google, Hootsuite, PagerDuty, Splunk, Coveo, Rubikloud, A Thinking Ape , Kira Systems, Georgian Partners, Element AI, Huawei Noah's Ark Laboratory, Kinaxis, Ford, Interset, and Deeplite. Again, some interviews went well, some did not, I had to withdraw from some. Many other different incidents also occured.

During both of the co-op job hunt seasons, none of the companies (be it 500+ or 10+ in strength) were reluctant to interview an International student (except Government agencies and that makes sense). This might not be the case south the border.

Rubikloud CEO's article about the need for more Canadian AI product companies.

Prof. Bengio also have been a strong proponent for homegrown companies for a long time. Both of their thoughts are to be seriously considered. But I personally think that it should be more than just AI, B2B Enterprise SaaS, and Gaming in Canada. Canada should also have more pure-tech startups focussing on other areas like Data stores, Developer tools, Network security etc., An example would be Manifold.co from Halifax. Also, more B2C startups with a potential to tap global markets should be formed.

End of the day, the US company (Amazon) and the Japanese company (Capcom) can do anything to streamline their operations. My opinion is that, "Foreign companies should co-exist along with a huge number of homegrown companies ". Also, Canada should ride well in the current wave but have a check on the number of diverse homegrown companies that are getting formed.