English

This course examines interpretations of urban legends from Hong Kong and other parts of the world using anthropological, sociological, psychological, and literary approaches accompanied with case-studies from different media and platforms. 

This course investigates how the cinematic medium represents, inspires, and shapes our understanding of the human condition. As breakthroughs in digital media and computer science reconfigure our physical and mental parameters, the question of what it means and what is involved to be human presses with increasing urgency. 

Students will watch, read about, and discuss select films across sub-topics that address a spectrum of human forms and conditions including robots, artificial intelligence, cyborgs, clones, etc., paired with critical texts that either offer theoretical conceptualizations of the human or explore the medium-specific qualities of cinema.  

Students will collaborate and present on at least one choice topic and conduct in-class research/discussion, building toward a final paper or creative project on a subject of their choice. 

In this studio course students will be introduced to a range of art practices. Making artworks in relation to a prescribed project, they will explore specific techniques and processes, idea generation, and creative analytical thinking.

This course focuses on sociological concepts and methods to link theory with evidence and asks how sociological concepts can be applied to the world around us. It develops the key skills of academic writing: how to write an effective academic research paper and how to read academic papers to link theory with evidence. A key learning objective is close reading of texts, understanding the key argument of each text, and applying concepts to the real world. This course has a theme of the "city" to focus on producing original research work on a focused domain. It uses key sociological readings, case studies, and in-the-news topics to study society as a complex space where buildings, people, animals, laws, policies, and international financial flows, intersect to produce our lived experience. The course examines sociological concepts through walks around in the city. It explores foundational texts and addresses specific questions related to inequality, power, conspiracy theories, global finance, environmental crisis, social policy, violence, segregation, and so on.

This course examines the fundamentals, basic properties and use of classical and modern nonparametric statistical methods for data analysis. Topics may include: order statistics; goodness-of-fit tests; rank tests for single-sample and two-independent samples; tests for designed experiments; permutation tests; tests for trends and association; jackknife and bootstrapping methods; nonparametric regression; nonparametric estimator and statistical functionals.

This course helps students refine their ability to understand and interpret research from across the discipline of geography and develop their capstone project. It assists students in developing evidence-based opinions about research and assists them in identifying how they can help to push forward research frontiers through their own research activities. Following introductory lectures on the research process the course involves reading research papers and identifying questions about them; participating in seminars given by geography researchers presenting a research project they have been involved with that relates to the papers they read; discussions about opportunities and challenges when conducting geographical research; and reflections on what they have learnt about the research process through the course. Students also practice their own writing skills.

What is sexual and gender diversity? How does the experience of our own genderedness and sexuality define members of sexual and gender minorities as people, and shape our opinions about those people who do not share our experiences or who do not express their sexuality in the same ways as we do? This course looks at these sorts of questions and does so while teaching about (and in many cases meeting and talking with) people whose gender or sexuality places them on the fringes of mainstream society. People who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or asexual; transgender people and individuals who cross dress, or play with bondage, domination, use pornography, and/or are involved in commercial sex activities. In lectures and tutorials we will examine questions such as: To what extent are sexual and gender diversity biologically ‘hard-wired’ rather than learned? What is ‘normal’ in human sexuality and gender? How, in an increasingly interconnected world, are our ideas about sexual and gender diversity changing? What are the intersectionality that we can discover in the whole course of learning and how do we use these learnings to help make a better world? 

This course examines to the computational modelling of natural language, including algorithms, formalisms, and applications. It covers computational morphology, language modelling, syntactic parsing, lexical and compositional semantics, discourse analysis, automatic summarization, machine translation, speech processing, and machine learning. 

An overview is given of a general communication link consisting of the three parts: transmitter, communication channel, and receiver. Examples of digital communication methods are introduced for realistic bit rates and noise levels. Some of the following applications are considered in the course: Mobile digital telephony (3G, EDGE, GSM), WLAN, modem, ADSL, digital TV, Bluetooth, navigation (GPS), surveillance systems.

This course develops knowledge of equality and diversity with a special focus on intersectionality. The course contains central theories and perspectives on diversity and equality. The course addresses how equality and diversity work is organized, developed, and run in different types of service organizations. These efforts reflect issues around individual situations and needs, which makes it doubly important to be able to understand and think critically about gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and functional impairment. The course gives space for both the critical analysis of organizational equality and diversity issues, as well as the application of theoretical tools to understand these.