English

This course studies future-defining themes such as Food, Water, Energy, Engineering, and Health both from an academic and real-life perspective. While learning about contemporary efforts and policies to address climate change, inequality, and globalization, the course also explores what these phenomena really entail and how they can be addressed through thinking and actions. The course discusses the thoughts of our greatest philosophers as well as site visits, interviews with leading policymakers, entrepreneurs, and scientists, and an exploration of real life. Understanding the essence of entrepreneurship in the realm of globally interconnected markets, production, and supply chains is a continuous thread throughout the course. Seeking to understand human behavior through the lens of consumption and lifestyles, key elements of positive psychology are studied. 

In this unit, students study five major authors working in a range of genres and offering radically different outlooks and outputs. Students explore the conditions in which their work was produced, and the social and political contexts in which it was consumed, reflecting critically throughout on the category of the "woman writer," and the history of scholarship thereon.

International criminal justice is at a crossroads. On the one hand, we now have an unprecedented ability to prosecute individuals accused of torture, genocide, and crimes against humanity both domestically and internationally, emblematic of the extent to which these kinds of prosecutions have become normalized over the last seventy years. On the other hand, more and more countries have raised concerns about the efficacy and fairness of international criminal prosecutions, arguing that they are selective or neo-colonialist, biased, or myopic. This is exemplified by the complex status and reception of the International Criminal Court, alternately lionized and criticized. This course introduces students to these debates and examines the legal and philosophical underpinnings of international criminal law and justice. 

This is a project-oriented class covering trending and novel Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research topics. This course focuses on Human-centered AI. 

The course surveys recent award-winning HCI papers for insight, with students undergoing through a complete HCI research cycle: Identifying a research question and reviewing related work to exploring solution design spaces; prototyping; conducting user studies, and writing a short paper. 

Previous class projects have been published in top HCI conferences (e.g., ACM CHI, UIST, SIGGRAPH, and MobileHCI) and have received multiple Best Paper/Honorable Mention awards. 
 

Why was love such a burning topic in pre-modern France? How did poetry and prose fashion attitudes towards women, men, love, and sex? What were pre-modern constructions of gender and were there any alternatives to traditional models? During this course, students answer these questions by consulting a wide range of pre-modern texts, including courtly romance, lyric poetry, short stories, and longer narrative. They examine the portrayal of love and the conventions that govern its representations in literature. Topics include the body, virtues and vices, marriage, sexuality, seduction, chastity and violence. Students compare how men and women treat these themes, and look at how women write in genres traditionally dominated by men. Knowledge of French is not required. English translations of the works studied can be read.

This course explores an appreciation of the unique aesthetics of fiction and non-fiction film from a holistic perspective.  The course looks at works from author-directors; documentaries, and anthropological films (also known as visual ethnography), which are categorized into different themes; the course them aims to see different expressions of the same theme in different films with a comparative discussion of films from other cultures.

The selected films are all Chinese language films, which means the class will enter the context of Chinese culture through the film text. It is not only the lines told in Chinese and the scenes taken on the ground in China, but the “the Chinese emotional presentation” and "the Chinese way of viewing.” 

The course also discusses a range of possibilities arising from the collision of film as an art form with the Chinese context.

This course provides an understanding of psychological knowledge in several inter-related domains concerned with the biological bases of behavior. Emphasis will be laid on basic experimental science from analysis of molecular and synaptic events, single cell studies, brain activity scans, and clinical studies, and the relationship between cognitive, emotional, behavioral, neurological, and physiological processes are examined.

This course explores the contemporary issues and debates which shape world politics today. It begins by introducing key elements in the study of International Politics, before moving on to look at the themes of power, conflict, and peace within International Relations. It covers the role and functions of institutions such as the United Nations and the role of states and other key actors in international politics. It explores the changing shape and character of conflict and explores this within the context of an arguably more fragmented and less cohesive international system. It also consider a wide range of issues such as the global environment, poverty, and underdevelopment. The course links concepts and theories with a number of contemporary case studies which consider patterns and trends in war and conflict, arguments for and against nuclear weapons, tensions around militarized humanitarian interventions and peacekeeping. 

After taking the course, students would be able to master basic knowledge and skills about deep learning, construct basic DL models for solving various science and engineering problems, and understand the cutting edge research papers.