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I.T. Services in UofT ECE Department
The purpose of this site is to provide basic information on the ECE department's computing environment.
The Edward S. Rogers Senior Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is a department within the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (FASE) of University of Toronto.
ECE's staff provide support services for faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students. Our staff includes I.T. support specialist groups for each of these user bases. This page covers ways to contact the right support group to get help on all issues around I.T.: computers, software, networking, remote access, and what you can do on your own devices.
Use of University I.T. resources are subject to terms and conditions of access.
Please read and observe these important conditions: Terms_of_use_and_access
ECE staff also provide support for office telephones, card and fob access to ECE labs and offices, wired ethernet connectivity in ECE offices and labs, software licensing support. We can also direct you where to go for services provided by other levels of the University:
- The Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (FASE):
- UofT ESC for centrally-administered services for all of UofT, including:
- T-Cards
- UTORid
- UTORmail service - username@utoronto.ca and username@mail.utoronto.ca
- Campus-wide UofT WiFi
- UTORvpn for remote access to the campus network
- lets you visit journal sites as a subscriber
Undergraduate Computing Support
ECE, in collaboration with the FASE ECF, operates a number of drop-in computer labs with an array of standard workstations running Linux or Microsoft Windows, where all ECE undergrad students have login access on each PC.
Current students have card-swipe access to drop-in computing labs using their T-Card during hours when the drop-in labs are open. Food and drink are not allowed in computing labs.
In addition, ECE provides many specialized hardware teaching labs with computers interfaced to specialty devices such as robots, FPGA boards, oscilloscopes, lasers and photonic instruments, and power electronics. Access to specialty labs is based on course enrolment. Some labs have important safety training required before students can enter and use these labs. See your course syllabus for details.
See https://www.ece.utoronto.ca/undergraduate-students/hardware-computer-labs/ for more info on drop-in computing labs and hardware labs.
Admin Staff Support
Administrative staff include Admin Coordinators, Chair's office staff, mailroom staff, and student support admin staff in the Graduate Office and Undergraduate Office. I.T. support for all admin staff is provided by Administrative Computing Support Specialist Roland Tan, under the direction of I.T. Director Jaro Pristupa.
Additional services for administrative functions are provided through ECE's public website plus the staff-only internal website, maintained by the Applications Programmer, reporting to the Director of Information Technology, Jaro Pristupa.
Research Computing Support
The Research Computing Support (RCS) group provides I.T. support for professors, research staff and research graduate students within ECE (MASc and PhD) for research-related computing, as well as for network services. ECE RCS operate our own email and web servers for research uses, in addition to the UTORmail service and the ECE department website.
Research computing end users work on desktop and laptop computers belonging to ECE research professors and assigned to members of their research group, as well as personally owned devices being used in connection with your research, such as your own laptop or home PC. Computers in ECE offices may be administered by staff (“Tier 1”) or self-managed (“Tier 2” or “Tier 3”), at the option of the owner. See
Also, in many cases, there are network servers and computing resources shared by members of one or more professors' research groups. Shared servers also may be administered by ECE staff or by end-users. Your supervisor can explain what computing resources are available to you, and who administers them.
The RCS support team have an e-mail based request ticket tracker to log all incoming requests by email. In the near future, we may also start using a new, web-based support portal for ECE based on ServiceNow. More info on this will be posted as this develops.
For now, please direct all research computing support request via email to ecehelp at ece.toronto.edu to reach our current RT request tracking system for RCS support.
Terms of Use and Access
Use of ECE resources and network access are subject to UofT and ECE department policies. Please read the full list of policies posted here: Terms and Conditions of Access.
You are responsible for the use of your login account and access to UofT and ECE resources through it. Do not share or disclose your password to anyone else.
The Terms of Use spell out our policies against:
- abuse;
- hacking, intrusion, forgery and impersonation;
- piracy and copyright violation
as well as restrictions on peer-to-peer network file sharing, excessive use of bandwidth, etc.
Be aware that hackers often send "phishing" emails claiming that you need to email them your login and password or visit an embedded link and give that information to keep your account open - never click on such links or reply to such requests. Our staff will never ask you to email us your password. If in doubt, please call or visit your I.T. support staff in person.
We strive to keep these pages up to date with our changing computing and support environment. We welcome feedback and suggestions on how to make these pages clearer. Please send suggestions about these pages to: ecehelp at ece.toronto.edu.
- SOFTWARE