The Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (formerly Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference), or CUSEC, is a conference held yearly in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, around mid-January since 2002. The conference promotes software engineering around a unique theme each year. Its audience is mostly the undergraduate students from different parts of Canada, with occasional participants from the academia or from the industry. Keynote speeches, tutorials, and corporate and academic presentations are given by the top figures and personalities in software engineering.
In 2000, John Kopanas, then an undergraduate student in the new software engineering program at Concordia University, envisioned the creation of a conference "by students, for students" in the field of software engineering. He and fellow students in the same program then put together plans and set them in motion. The result of their effort was the first edition of the conference, CUSEC 2002, which took place in Montreal, lasted 2 days, and attracted an audience of over 150 students from across Canada.
Witnessing the success of the first conference, Kopanas decided to continue the tradition and expand the conference. By 2007, the number of attendees had grown to over 350 students and professionals. The number of keynote speeches had also increased to five and the conference now lasts three days instead of two.