Singapore University of Technology and Design

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.

This course examines the international environment for business and offers theoretical and practical knowledge in implementing international strategies, marketing for successfully penetrating international markets, managing international firms, and potential risks for operating internationally. The content of this course is divided into four parts. The first part covers the international business environment that firms are currently facing, and the opportunity that a firm can have while it expands internationally. The second part offers a basic but systematic knowledge about different modes of international business operations (e.g. export, international marketing, license trade, strategic alliance, direct investment), and the advantages and disadvantages of each mode. The third part focuses on the management of major functions of business operation in an international context, such as how to design an organizational structure for international business; how to manage global production, logistics, and supply chain; and how to manage corporate finance, and international human resources. The last part is dedicated to the influential factors of international business operations: politics and culture, two major factors that impact on and bring potential risks to international business operation. 

This course provides an overview of robot mechanisms, dynamics, and intelligent controls. Topics include planar and spatial kinematics, and motion planning; mechanism design for manipulators and mobile robots; multi-body dynamics; control design, actuators, and sensors; sensing and perception to enable intelligent behavior; and computer vision. Weekly laboratories provide experience with servo drives, real-time control, task modelling and embedded software. Students will build working robotic systems in a group-based term project.

The latest industrial revolution is named as Industry 4.0, which is defined as the combination of smart manufacturing systems and developed information technologies. The success model of Industry 4.0 is enabled by a group of tools such as cloud computing, machine learning, big data, internet of things, and cyber physical systems. This course provides a study of Industry 4.0 and its revolutionary implications to smart manufacturing, smart products/services, and smart cities. The implementation, opportunities and challenges of Industry 4.0 are also discussed. The powerful change in production techniques will require the extensive use of digital intelligence in the entire production process. As one of the important manufacturing methods of Industry 4.0, additive manufacturing (AM) or three-dimensional (3D) printing is introduced in the second part of course. 3D printing offers numerous benefits to a smart factory, such as high production efficiency, time and material saving, rapid prototyping, and decentralized production methods. This course provides a comprehensive study on the liquid, solid and powder-based 3D printing methods. It also offers insights on the applications and future trend of 3D printing.

Automatic methods of Information Retrieval (IR) have gained greater significance in recent years due to the dramatic increase in the amount of data available on the Web. The data is often present in multiple forms (such as text, image, video) and hence it is necessary that the IR techniques being deployed on the web are able to perform various operations such as search and retrieval across all these different data formats. In this course, the study of IR is focused on the methodologies of indexing, processing, and querying of primary textual data and extended to video and image data in the latter part of the course.

Decentralized blockchain-based systems, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are successful beyond all expectations. Although still in their infancy, they promise to revolutionize how we think of financial, information, and other infrastructures. This course covers the technical aspects of public distributed ledgers, blockchain systems, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts. It covers how these systems are built, how to interact with them, and how to design and build secure distributed applications.

This course works through the stages of critical thinking and provides a study of the basic principles of ‘clarity’, ‘precision’ and ‘reasoning’; culminating in a debate of complex, current issues affecting the workplace. It also covers management theory and contemporary management practices in a “VUCA” (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment.

This course on leadership and organization management considers the characteristics of human interaction and cooperation that make organizations effective and efficient. Adopting a leadership perspective, the course covers organizational behavior, organizational management, organizational change, and organizational leadership in a range of environmental and cultural contexts. The course develops the concepts of leadership and organization management by introducing well-established theories and practices, progressively exploring their applicability under group and organizational situations of varying contextual uncertainty and cultural diversity. The course guides students towards a practical appreciation of human cognitive, emotional and behavioral characteristics in organizations by developing a framework for applying appropriative global leadership, strategic and operational leadership approaches. 

History often serves as the dramatic backdrop for many popular computer games we play today. Yet such historical representations are often riddled with misrepresentations and inaccuracies. This course provides the historical knowledge necessary to build a credible and coherent history based story for video‐games through the lens of some significant periods in European history such as the history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire until Charlemagne and notable historical figures including Julius Caesar, Constantine the Great, Attila, and Theoderic. The course focuses on some already existing and very successful video‐games, namely the three versions of the Total War video‐game: “Rome: Total War” (2004) “Rome: Total War” (2005), “Attila: Total War” (2015). Through a better understanding of history, students acquire a firmer grasp of the value of historical knowledge and its rich potential for storytelling and the creation of compelling virtual worlds and online experiences.