English

In this course, students learn to explain the behavior and properties of fluids (static and dynamic), solve problems involving incompressible flows, and apply these basic principles in flow measurements and other flow (e.g. pipe) related problems, and (ii) to develop a basic understanding of conductive, diffusion and convective heat and mass transport, emphasizing first principles analysis, and apply it to a broad range of contexts.

This course looks at various candidates for the "Great American Novel," a term for fictional narratives that seem to capture the essence of the United States. The course examines the concept's origins following the American Civil War, evolution throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and enduring appeal in the popular imagination. Selected fiction is considered in relation to US national identity, the ideal of the American dream, notions of authorship, and anxieties toward social issues such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation.

This course covers the concepts, paradigms, and explanations needed to become effective practitioners in culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse classrooms and schools. An important of goal of this course is to help future educators attain a sophisticated understanding of the concept of culture and to view race/ethnicity, gender, and class as interacting concepts rather than as separate and distinct. As a result, intersectionality, i.e., how race/ethnicity, gender and class are fluid variables that interact in complex ways is an overarching concept in this course. In doing so, the course integrates the content of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to provide students an opportunity to explore issues of inequalities and injustices related to race/ethnicity, gender, and class within their communities from a global perspective.  

The course collaborates with National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) through online interactions and Project-Based Learning (PBL) to facilitate participants’ understanding of local issues and current circumstances pertaining to race/ethnicity, gender, and social class in South Korea and Taiwan. Through PBL focusing on student-selected topics, participants from both societies will actively engage in intercultural collaboration and knowledge exchange, promoting social inclusivity and advancing SDGs grounded in principles of multicultural education and sustainable development. 

In the last two decades, an increasing number of artists have engaged the specters of colonialism that continue to haunt us in our postcolonial present. In their work, the archive often figures as source or resource, matter or metaphor, and presence or absence of the colonial past. Considering the intensity of this archival return, it is no exaggeration to state that the archive has emerged as a paradigm through which artists pursue engagements with colonial histories. In their work the archive enables them to confront the legacies of their colonial pasts and provides them with possibilities to conceptualize the hidden histories and counter-memories that have been suppressed by screen memories whose traumatic contents need to be addressed to open up alternative futures. Conventionally imagined as a technology for the storage of traces of the past, in this context the archive may be thought of as a site to rethink the past, present, and future. This seminar examines how work in the archive explores alternative relations between past, present and future. This is done by examining a range of practices adopted by scholars, archivists, social activists, and contemporary artists in their engagement with the archive. This includes themes like; how colonial archives have been neglected, destroyed, and replaced by decolonial archives; how photographers have embraced archival images as material to recycle and repurpose; how contemporary artists have developed alternative archival epistemologies; how restitution might be conceived as a form of archival memory work; and why, in the post-apartheid context in South Africa, the decolonization of the university has been conceived as a question of the archive. In sum, the seminar examines how the archival turn addresses the question of African futures.

This course teaches students to evaluate geometric machine learning as a tool to model common learning frameworks. Students design optimizers on Riemannian manifolds to implement smooth constrained optimization; synthesize discrete operators on graphs from their continuous versions; and modify learning models to operate on constrained domains and outcomes. As part of the course, students implement deep learning on unstructured domains such as graphs, point sets, and meshes, as well as mechanisms to yield structured output from learning models.

This course consists of practical project work or audit and an evaluation field stay including technologies and background information necessary to develop sustainable community-based projects, e.g. PV training, CO2compensation, household biogas plants, clean cooking, biogas, income generation. International student hybrid working groups develop CO2 compensation projects for climate and SDGs tackling the needs of the local partner communities together with the partner NGOs. The course offers research and innovation opportunities to deepen the development and application of sustainable technologies and methodologies. It also includes cooperation with local community organizations, NGOs, international universities, and other partners.

This course's aim is to develop an understanding of large language models (LLM) as well as their evaluation and to practice reading, understanding, and presenting research work. As part of the class, methods for the selection of data and LLMs, data preparation, application and evaluation of LLMs are developed and put into practice. The use cases are examples from the field of natural language processing, e.g. translation, summary of text, or information extraction.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor.

Climate change is no longer an abstract future threat. Human population is at the center of the climate system. A demographic perspective is hence critical for understanding, on the one hand, the impact of human activities on the global climate, and, on the other hand, the impacts of climate change on human population. Upon successful completing of this course, students have the knowledge and skills to: 1) demonstrate an understanding of how human population contributes to anthropogenic climate change taking into account demographic heterogeneity; 2) demonstrate an understanding of how anthropogenic climate change differentially affects human health, wellbeing and livelihoods; 3) critically evaluate and explain different scientific and statistical evidence employed to study the links between population dynamics and climate change; 4) conduct research through the consultation of academic literature and/or through the collection and analysis of data; 5) work in groups and develop class discussions. The course topics include:

• Introduction to population and climate change interactions
• Climate change and demographic heterogeneity (e.g. age, gender, education, income, locations)
• Population and energy consumption/carbon emissions
• Population, water, and food
• Climate change and health and mortality
• Climate change and family and fertility
• Climate change and migration
• Climate change and future population dynamics
• Date and methods for the study of population and climate change

This course introduces the study of democracy and democratization, which is one of the core sub-fields in comparative politics. Drawing on classic and cutting-edge work, it covers four major topics in the field: the concepts and typologies of democracy, regime transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, the consolidation of democracy, and democratic backsliding. The course helps students develop theoretical understanding about what democracy is and how democracy can be established and developed, or de-consolidated. 

The course includes designated class discussions/debates on South Korean democracy and democratization. Therefore, a substantial level of knowledge of Korean politics is needed to participate in class discussions/debates. 

This course extends the statistical ideas introduced in the first year to more complex settings. Mathematically, the central concept is the linear model, a framework for statistical modelling that accommodates multiple predictor variables, continuous and categorial, in a unified way. There is a focus on fitting models to real data from a variety of problem domains, using R to perform computations.