Juliana De La Vega may not care for Canada’s winters or our bland imported fruit, but the University of Toronto graduate from Colombia says she can’t think of a better place to launch a career.
While De La Vega initially flirted with the idea of working in Silicon Valley, she ultimately decided to focus her job hunt in Toronto while completing a master's degree in applied computing with a focus on machine learning.
She’s now employed as a deep-learning engineer at Toronto-based Surgical Safety Technologies. The startup uses artificial intelligence to comb through video and other operating room data to try and make surgeries safer.
“Basically, what we do here is, after the surgery happens, we will analyze [video and other data] to detect specific parts in the procedure where the surgeon may have made a mistake or an area that can be improved on,” says De La Vega, who did her undergrad in Colombia in biomedical engineering and spent eight months working at Surgical Safety Technologies as part of her degree.
David Acuna, another graduate of U of T’s applied computing program, is among those working at a Toronto office of a U.S. tech heavyweight – in this case, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia Corp., which makes graphics processing units, or GPUs, used for both gaming and machine learning applications.