English

This course focuses on the viability of innovative product ideas, one of the three domains that make up the desirability-feasibility-viability innovation framework. Through a series of lecture classes, workshops, case studies, industry talks, and a major group project, students learn several tools that help them to: (a) understand industry value chain and competitive strategies, (b) develop value propositions for their product ideas, (c) explore various business models, and (d) craft effective go-to-market approaches. Students with promising product ideas can pursue them for further development and prototyping in subsequent project courses.

This course takes students on a journey from the seemingly familiar surroundings of everyday France to a more complex and enriched understanding of the key debates and issues which have defined French and Francophone identities over the centuries. Using source material in French (also available in translation for ab initio students), it focuses on figures and places that seem easily recognizable to many students and scholars of France and explores the networks of often competing ideas and values that have shaped who or what they are perceived to be today.

This course navigates across European art movements, highlighting an intensive exchange and collaboration between German and Russian artistic and intellectual circles involved in the radical avant-garde practices after the First World War and the October Revolution (1917-1930). Covering debates on the artistic strategies of intervention in society, politics, everyday life, mass media, and urban planning, each session focuses on a theoretical response to a specific problem and a case study of artistic practices across various media and forms, including fine art, architecture, cinema, literature, and theatre.

This course introduces the concept of climate justice through the world-leading sustainability research being done at the University of Sussex. Climate justice brings a focus on social equity and historical responsibility to understandings of climate change. It recognizes that climate change exacerbates existing inequalities and has a disproportionately high impact on those who are least responsible for causing the problem. In this course, explore questions of extractivism, climate responsibility, finance and funding, ecosystem uncertainty and activism through a series of lectures, case studies, seminars and workshops. Learn about the colonial roots of contemporary environmental justice conflicts and the range of responses proposed to the climate crisis, while working in groups to discuss, design and propose alternatives. The course is both solutions-focused and interactive, students have the chance to work in groups throughout as you reflect collectively on how they would address particular challenges. Teaching is conducted both inside and outside of the classroom, with workshops taking place in the landscape of the Brighton & Lewes Downs Biosphere Reserve and South Downs National Park. Assessments encourage students to engage proactively in practical examples of climate justice and develop their public communication skills.  Students work on a short group-produced presentation, podcast or video to explore a debate or an example of local activism, and the final assessment will be a blog designed to enhance public understanding of climate justice. 

This course examines various arts and themes from a region now called Asia, from the past to the present. Rather than providing a chronological or regional survey, it is designed to introduce students to the similarities and differences among cultures, their histories, and the skills needed to critically analyze visual materials from these regions. The primary focus will be on China, allowing students to utilize external resources such as museums and art galleries in Hong Kong. The course aims to highlight key ideas and themes in Asian art history, including how these concepts are transmitted, adapted, and transformed across different regions. Students will gain insights into fundamental aspects of Asian art, such as Buddhism, the Confucian code of authority, the significance of ink and brush painting, and contemporary art discussions that have global impact. 

This course provides fundamental information on climate dynamical processes and how we study them - currently and in the past. The course examines both strengths and limitations of terrestrial and marine proxy climate records used to study past climate of the late Holocene and Quaternary as well as introducing students to the fundamentals of modelling the climate system.

This course introduces the key principles of mathematical modelling, which then are explored through several real-world examples in disease modelling, environmental planning, and population dynamics. The techniques of calculus are essential, although core concepts such as differential equations are revisited. Students also touch on the mathematical models used in data science, particularly the techniques of principal component analysis and clustering, both essential tools in machine learning models.  

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The course consists of theoretical lessons and practical sessions. In each lesson, after a theoretical introduction, a practical session takes place in which the student is asked to experience the introduced topic first-hand. The course is organized in two modules. The first module covers basic programming concepts, the second module covers advanced topics. The topics of the lectures include:

• Introduction to programming
• Introduction to the Python language
• Importing and Exporting data and text in Python
• Manipulating data and text in Python
• Describing and visualizing data in Python
• Libraries for Machine Learning

At the end of the course, the student has competences on theoretical and practical foundations for the acquisition, manipulation, and analysis of text and data using computational tools. Furthermore, the student will be familiar with the methodological foundations for the development of scripts for natural language processing. They know and use the fundamental algorithms and data structures and are able to build and interpret graphs that show descriptive statistics of the data collected in order to facilitate its analysis.

This course covers two parts for international economics, international trade and international finance. In the first part, we will examine the causes and effects of international trade. We will analyze the content of trade, the distribution of gains to trade, and measure of the Global Value Chain. The effects of trade on economic growth, wage, employment, economic inequality, and environment will be studied. Lastly, we will explore why countries may want to limit and regulate international trade, and discuss the causes of trade conflicts and possible solutions. The second part of the course covers topics in open-economy macroeconomics and in international finance. We will first introduce national income accounting and the balance of payments, and discuss the relation between international trade and financial transactions. We will then study exchange rate, an important international price, exchange rate determination, and exchange rate regime. Finally, we will discuss the theory and policy of open-economy macroeconomics, and the internationalization of the Chinese yuan.

This course provides a basic introduction to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). With an algorithmic approach, it offers a practical understanding of the methods that are reviewed, not least through their own implementation of several of the methods. The course covers supervised classification based on, for example, artificial neural networks (deep learning), in addition to unsupervised learning (cluster analysis), regression, optimization (evolutionary algorithms and other search methods) and reinforcement learning, as well as design of experiments and evaluation. The course also provides an introduction to philosophical fundamental problems and ethical issues related to ML/AI, in addition to the history of the field.