John DiMarco is presently the Director of Information Technology at
the Department of Computer Science at
the University of Toronto, his
alma mater. Since the late 1980s, he has held progressive technical positions in
the department, including Research Assistant, Systems Manager for
the Department's teaching laboratories, and Management lead for
CSLab, the Department's primary research laboratory. In the early 1990s, John took a brief leave from the University to help start up Platform Computing Corporation, which became a highly successful HPC-focused software company, eventually acquired by IBM in 2012.
In the early 2000s, John became the Department's first IT Director, a role he has carried out ever since.
As Director of IT, John has overseen the growth and development of the department's computing in every respect, during an extended period of substantial change. Acting in both a managerial and a senior technical capacity, he has overseen the integration of both proprietary and commodity hardware and software, along with locally developed technology, into advanced laboratory infrastructure that provides comprehensive computing support for Computer Science teaching and research. Past research work supported includes the seminal machine learning research of Geoffrey Hinton and his graduate students, including the PhD research of Ilya Sutskever, later co-founder of and chief scientist at OpenAI.
John holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.