English

This course explores what makes Japanese film directors not mere metteur-en-scene (director) but auteurs (authors) by surveying the visual forms and styles of their films as well as analyzing their preferred narrative concerns, contents and themes. It is not difficult to find auteurs in the Japanese cinema world: Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, and Oshima Nagisa are a few of the representative Japanese auteurs who, commanding absolute control over most stages of film-making, managed to create films with superlative characteristics in narrative, theme and visual style. Auteurs are film directors who have imprinted their own signature on their work. By the end of this course, the class is expected to recognize the signature of each auteur.

Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Blockchain Technology have an increasingly transformative impact on people and society. This course introduces the different ways to theorize emerging technology, reflect on its ethical impacts, and use practical tools to integrate ethical reflection in day-to-day projects. The course consists of three parts. The first part of the course covers the basics: presenting major ethical issues with emerging technologies from a historical perspective, explaining the link between ethical theories and technology, and presenting different ways to think about technological mediation. The second part focuses on ethics of particular types of emerging technologies: of artificial intelligence (e.g. deep learning), artificial life (e.g. genetic modification), and existential machines (e.g. the atomic bomb). The third part contextualizes the ethics of emerging technologies in a discussion of three global challenges: global citizenship and human rights, climate change, and violence. The course uses methods of philosophical reflection, argumentation, empirical and historical research, and applied ethics.

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. Through the critical review of classical theories of capitalism, students discuss both fixed and invariant elements in the development of modern capitalism and what makes peculiar its contemporary forms. Students examine some of the most important concepts in present intellectual and political debate, such as globalization, financialization, etc. The course begins with a historical and theoretical framing of the question regarding the peculiarity of contemporary capitalism, briefly considering some of the most influential classical approaches to the study of capitalism. The course subsequently focuses on more recent debates and examines several proposals to conceptually grasp the specific capitalist formation that began to take shape in the early 1970s. Such concepts as flexible accumulation and late capitalism, the knowledge economy and neoliberalism, cognitive and postcolonial capitalism, Empire and postfordism, "racial capitalism" and feminist critique of political economy are critically discussed. The course then focuses on the so-called "platform capitalism." Taking platforms both as emerging business model and as a political form the course investigates their origins in the intertwined domains of logistics and digitization. It then focuses on the operations of some of the most important platforms - from Uber to Amazon, from Deliveroo to Airbnb - and discusses their implications both for the transformation of urban spaces and for labor (introducing such notions as "algorithmic management" and "digital labor"). In general, platforms are taken both as a specific research object and as a lens that allows discerning wider tendencies in the development of contemporary capitalism.

This course offers an introduction of corpus linguistics for graduate students, including the necessary tools, techniques, and analysis methodologies for doing corpus-based studies and corpus annotation projects. Existing major corpora are scrutinized for a better understanding of their linguistic uses. The course enables students to make, annotate and search corpora, as well as to perform a quantitative analysis of some linguistic phenomenon. Students will also gain hands-on experience in these areas by working on a specific topic of their own interest. 

The six-week summer lab research program at National Taiwan University places students in various science, engineering and social science research labs and/or projects under the supervision of faculty. Students spend approximately 30 hours per week in lab activities.

This course covers ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations. Topics include: first-order differential equations; second-order linear differential equations; linear systems of differential equations; nonlinear systems and stability; method of separation of variables; Sturm-Liouville Problems; Inhomogeneous Problems.

Pre-requisites: Calculus I, Calculus II, and Linear Algebra.