English

This course examines horror’s aesthetic, experiential, and political dimensions, while investigating why and how it has persisted as one of popular culture’s most vigorous and influential genres. It closely considers a range of classic and contemporary films, TV shows and video games, confronting questions of power, affect, mediation and representation.

This course teaches how to identify opportunities for innovation and develop user-centered, impactful, and innovative digital solutions that respond to real-world needs. Through a combination of theoretical insights and practical tasks, explore how new digital solutions can drive change across various industries and societal needs.

Work in teams on real-world problems, realize bold ideas, and develop MVPs (minimum viable products) with mentoring and supervision. Key skills include market analysis, requirement elicitation, innovation strategy, solution making, and effective pitching.

This course uses a human-centered lens to examine security and privacy, focusing on how design and research can create solutions that people can understand, trust, and use.  

Security and privacy are as much about people as they are about technology. Many failures arise not just from a lack of technical capability, but from mismatches with how people think, behave, and interact in their everyday contexts. 

Students engage with real-world topics ranging from authentication and security warnings to deceptive patterns, AI privacy, and privacy and security challenges in sensing environments, while learning foundational methods in user research and usable security and privacy evaluation. Through critical readings, class discussions, and hands-on projects, students develop skills to understand and design for human factors in security and privacy contexts. 

Key themes include: 1) Human-centered research methods for security and privacy, 2) Usable security tools, access control, and warnings 3) AI-enabled security and privacy challenges, 4) Sensing environments and security/privacy issues, and 5) Ethics and social implications in security and privacy 

This course questions the place of researchers in the 21st century and law through the ethnographer's field. Is there such a field? The course introduces basic concepts of law and anthropology, human sciences, its colonial background and methodological critiques to further how lawyers can lean in and explore anthropology's paradigm of alterity to further critical legal thinking and how anthropologists and other social scientists can look at law as a cultural technique. The course discusses why using empirical work, sometimes uncomfortable for a researcher, similar to looking in the mirror, can contribute to better addressing today's ethical and political challenges. Through the revision of diverse examples, old and new, students learn about the method of “explorers."

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This course advances students' understanding of structural behavior and enhances their ability to apply structural analysis methods to civil engineering structures. Students acquire knowledge in the following areas: Structural Matrix Analysis, i.e., techniques for analyzing 2D truss and frame structures using the Direct Stiffness Method and FEM software. Buckling Analysis, i.e., methods for buckling and post-buckling analysis of discrete and continuous systems, with FEM applications. Plastic Analysis, i.e., concepts of plasticity, incremental and limit analysis for truss and beam systems, also using FEM tools. The main skills developed during this course include: Proficiency in matrix analysis and the Finite Element Method (FEM) for analyzing truss and frame structures. Ability to evaluate buckling and post-buckling behavior of rigid and continuous systems, using equilibrium and energy methods. Competence in conducting plastic analysis of structural systems, including an understanding of plastic hinges. Software Proficiency: hands-on experience with FEM-based software for solving structural, buckling, and elasto-plastic problems. Analytical and critical thinking: enhanced ability to approach complex structural issues with theoretical and computational tools. The course contributes to the objectives of the master’s program related to the application of mathematical tools for interpreting, describing, and modeling structural problems.

A prior knowledge and understanding of the static behavior of planar truss and beam structures is recommended. The course includes theoretical lectures (module 1), exercises and laboratory sessions (module 2). 

In this course, students draw on approaches from Cultural Studies to examine the relationship between literature as a creative industry and literature as aesthetic practice. Focusing on 20th and 21st century works by authors traditionally situated at ‘the margins’ of nation-based literary systems, students ask what role marketing and the literary industry might have to play in how a writer’s voice becomes heard. In doing so, students take up Graham Huggans’ suggestion that a boom in postcolonial literature has been accompanied by a fetishization of difference or a ‘marketing of the margins’ which is at odds with many of the positions espoused in that literature. Students move beyond the Anglophone context in order to explore the application of this idea to authors from a range of countries and texts originally written in French, German, and Spanish.

This course covers the principles of neuroscience with a focus on neural circuits and systems. It begins with the structure and function of neurons, including action potential propagation and synaptic communication, followed by sensory systems such as olfaction, hearing, and vision, exploring how external signals are converted into neural activity and processed in the brain. The course then examines motor control and memory systems. Emphasis is placed on modern research techniques, including functional imaging, optogenetics, and connectomics. Through group projects, participants develop skills in reading, evaluating, and presenting scientific literature, preparing them for research careers or applications in public health and technology.

This course gives knowledge of and familiarity with concepts and methods from the theory of dynamical systems which are important in applications within almost all subjects in science and technology. In addition, the course should develop the student's general ability to assimilate and communicate mathematical theory, to express problems from science and technology in mathematical terms and to solve problems using the theory of dynamical systems.

This course provides a broad overview of the field of bioinformatics, with a focus on practical application and interpretation of results from tools used in everyday biological research. Assumed Knowledge in MAT15403 Statistics 2.