I'm currently a student at the UofA, and I do Machine Learning / Deep Learning professionally; These are pretty good news, I know a lot of these professors personally and they do a lot of great (fundamental) work in the field of RL / ML, with a lot of collaboration happening between the university and the private sectors.
Hopefully, this will provide the needed boost to the University's CS department, and particularly Edmonton's tech sector.
University of Alberta has a very strong pure mathematics department (especially in Functional Analysis and Algebra). Pairing this with a strong Computer Science department could eventually bring it to a level to compete with Waterloo.
On the other hand, as someone who grew up in edmonton, I don't ever want to live there again. It's a tough city to live in, though it has its beauty when you look hard enough.
- getting dark around 4/5pm
- extremely dry and cold
- winter starts in October, lasts until late April
- massive urban sprawl so the city core is dead during the winter, and therefore the city feels lifeless.
That's particularly bleak and definitely biased, but it's not far from the truth.
I lived and worked downtown in the late 90s/early 00s, and going back recently, I have to say that it is a lot better than it used to be. There is an incredible amount of investment in the core, and the whole ice district area on 104th ave is pretty remarkable, including the new museum, hockey arena, and Stantec tower—which will be 68-stories high, quite surprisingly, the tallest tower in Canada outside of Toronto. The city has also invested in light rail expansion, and just installed a new bike grid in the downtown core. Things feel very different than they used to.
The short days are definitely tough. The shortest day of the year has less than 8 hours of sunshine. Sun comes up at 9am and sets by 4pm. However, Edmonton is usually quite sunny in the winter.
Conversely the summers are great. It's light from 5am to 10pm, so get almost 17 hours of sunlight. If you include twilight, it's more like 18 hours.
Yeah, I agree. I lived in London, UK for a while and found the lack of sunlight much worse. Edmonton has a lot of sun, which makes it pretty tolerable.
The past couple years winters have been worse in New York than in Edmonton. Maybe that's the new normal now. The hard part isn't the cold so much as the lack of daylight during the winter solstice period.
Oh God, I looked at a homemade video of Edmonton snow... even the crunching sounds set my teeth on edge. I don't see how anyone could endure that all the way from October to May.
Meh. It's such a personal thing: I never found it particularly bothersome.
People talk up how hard winters are (and let's be honest - we all prefer temperate temperatures) but good clothing goes a long, long way in your maintaining winter comfort. A good windproof jacket, warm socks, waterproof boots, long johns, and warm hat and gloves go a long way. Get good at layering and things get a lot easier.
I find winters in New York harder to deal with: I have to dress warmly for the outside, and everyone seems to set the heat to "roasting" inside. Weird.
Did you go to school in Edmonton in 1890 or something? I grew up near Edmonton too and while January/Feb can certainly cross the -30 mark from time to time (and barely), -40 is unheard of. Maybe with windchill, like once or twice a year.
For the week of January 7th, the highest temperate was -28C. Lowest was -37C.
The prior week had a high of -25C.
Go back another year to 1997 and the temperature for the week of January 19th was a high of -30C and a low of -41C. I remember it fondly. The temperature never got above -30C for almost 10 days.
Hopefully, this will provide the needed boost to the University's CS department, and particularly Edmonton's tech sector.