Where Canadian Universities Rank for Artificial Intelligence (AI)

I’ve been involved in AI for about 8 years and believe there’s so much opportunity for Canada and especially the Province of Alberta, to move up the ranks to become a global leader in AI. But it won’t be easy — the government and private sector need to start building frameworks, tools and applications that can be built in a matter of months, not decades or even ‘years’. While industries like Oil & Gas can afford to wait for innovation, high tech companies cannot.

According to the EduRank website:

A graph of 38.5M citations received by 1.51M academic papers made by 2,797 universities in the World was used to calculate publications’ ratings, which then were adjusted for release dates and added to final scores.

That’s a very strong data set in my opinion — good enough to draw meaningful conclusions.

How Canada performs Worldwide

Canada has 1 university in the top 10 worldwide, and 3 in the top 50.

• University of Toronto — 5 in the World
• University of British Columbia — 39 in the World
• University of Montreal — 50 in the World
• University of Waterloo — 53 in the World
• University of Alberta — 77 in the World
• McGill University — 81 in the World
• Simon Fraser University — 108 in the World

How Canada performs in North America

• University of Toronto — 5th
• University of British Columbia — 24th
• University of Montreal — 29th
• University of Waterloo — 32nd
• University of Alberta — 42nd
• McGill University — 44th
• Simon Fraser University — 52nd

Most of the World’s top universities for AI are in the US:

1. Carnegie Mellon University
2. MIT (US)
3. Stanford (US)
4. UC Berkley (US)
5. University of Toronto (Canada)
6. University of Illinois at Urbana (US)
7. University of Oxford (UK)
8. Tsinghua University (China)
9. University of Southern California (US)
10. University of Washington — Seattle (US)

If you enjoyed this article you might enjoy a keynote presentation I gave at the Yle TV broadcast studios in Helsinki in 2017 — my friend Chris Messina, inventer of the #hashtag and incredible thinker, recommended me for the talk — thanks again Chris! The event page that describers the purpose of the talk is here, my slides are here, and the video of my keynote is here. I go into a lot of detail around the things that people should think about before they even start to work with AI — ethics being a critical aspect that almost everyone omits in their project today. My talks is around chatbots and conversational interfaces at a time when it was exceptionally new — so the market has matured quite a lot over the past 5 years.