Singapore University of Technology and Design

This course examines how states have attempted to apply and develop surveillance technologies with ever greater accuracy, scale, and speed (as well as when and how they did not). Geographically, this course covers from South Asia to East Asia. It focuses on how colonial, national, and postcolonial governments have tried to control their subjects and foreigners within their territory, as well as how people have responded to these state initiatives. After introducing relevant theoretical frameworks, the course investigates specific technologies such as fingerprints, photographs, anthropometrics, and CCTV, examining their historical development and impact on individual lives in modern Asian societies. Students examine people’s responses to surveillance technologies in modern Asia, ranging from adherence to protest and appraise the use of surveillance in today’s Asian societies based on its historical trajectories.

This course provides research training for exchange students. Students work on a research project under the guidance of assigned faculty members. Through a full-time commitment, students improve their research skills by participating in the different phases of research, including development of research plans, proposals, data analysis, and presentation of research results. A pass/no pass grade is assigned based a progress report, self-evaluation, midterm report, presentation, and final report.

This course introduces topics relevant for understanding the modern framework for evaluating investment opportunities. It combines key elements of managerial accounting and finance, as well as modern portfolio and asset pricing theory. The course discusses how to apply the core tool of analytic finance to assess the value of company projects, including those undertaken by start‐ups, and how to analyze financial market conditions to recommend investment strategies. The course discusses topics including key accounting metrics and applying these metrics to evaluate the performance of a company; identity and interpretation techniques to value cash flows from investing in firm projects; developing equity valuation frameworks that link stock prices to firm cash flows and risk; deriving optimal allocation rules for investing in portfolios with one or two risky assets; identifying optimal portfolio allocation rules for many risky assets, such as stocks, commodities, real estate, and bonds; combining the optimal allocation rules with index models to identify the degree of diversification in an optimal portfolio; hypothesizing and deriving a linear relation between risk and expected returns; define factors that determine bond prices; and synthesizing bond pricing relations with no‐arbitrage equilibrium models of spot and forward rates.

This course introduces the broad discipline of biomedical engineering, and the fundamental life science and engineering principles associated with biomedical systems and healthcare delivery. The course focuses on three key application areas of biomedical implants, instrumentation, and diagnostics, and discusses the theoretical and practical considerations relevant to the design and development of biomedical devices, tools, and systems in these areas.

This course is a connected and comparative history of Asia before 1750 that introduces the region’s major political, economic, and intellectual contours prior to British colonization. The course focuses on tracing the history of premodern Asia through three types of transregional cultural formation: large empires, trading zones, and religious ecumene. The course explores and discusses how these formations unfolded across Central and Eastern Asia and South and Southeast Asia and uses them as a lens for thinking critically about the scope of Asia as a geographical, political, economic, and cultural category in premodern history.

This course explores the fundamentals of structure and energetics that underpin materials science. An appreciation of structure underlies nearly every design and application of materials to a greater or lesser extent and many fascinating materials phenomena. The course discusses how to describe the structure of crystalline and non-crystalline states, and the various (e.g., point, line, and surface) imperfections in materials. The course also discusses how to determine the structure using diffraction techniques. The subject matter of this course can be applied to many real-world examples such as materials for fuel cells and batteries, engineered alloys, electronic and magnetic materials, polymers, and biomaterials. The course examines topics including: materials structure, how it is influenced by the interatomic bonding and processing parameters, and how materials properties are determined by the structure; metals, ceramics, polymers, and composites; how to describe the structure of materials using structural descriptors and understanding the difference between gasses, liquids, amorphous, and crystalline solids; defects in crystalline materials: point defects in solids, line defects, slip planes, and dislocations; equilibrium phase diagrams; electronic, mechanical, magnetic, and optical properties of materials; and the structure-processing-properties relationship and the life-cycle assessment for selection of materials and development of sustainable materials in the design of parts, structures, and products.