English

This course examines time series with applications. Fundamental concepts of time series such as trends, stationary process, ARIMA process, model building (including parameter estimation, order determination and diagnostic checking), forecasting and seasonal models, ARCH and GARCH models will be covered. The use of related statistical packages will be demonstrated. 

This course examines Japanese cultural history and social background of modern Japan.

The Ottoman Empire was one of the four principal political, military, and cultural forces in the premodern world (together with the Qing, Mughal and Habsburg empires), and still a power to be reckoned with in the modern period until 1918. With its core in the Aegean and Balkans, the empire exercised hegemony over large parts of the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Central Europe for many centuries. Taking the perspective of world history, this course provides a basic knowledge of Ottoman history and culture, especially during the last three hundred years of its more than six centuries long existence. In a more general sense, the course introduces the developing historical fields of empire studies and court studies. The course reviews the current historiographical debates about the nature and impact of Ottoman rule, including the question of ‘modernization’. Special attention is paid to the entanglements of politics, religion and ethnic identity in the region. This includes a critical appraisal of hackneyed terms and binaries, such as the east-west dichotomy, the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, and the very concept of ‘the Middle East’ itself. In addition, the course introduces students to Ottoman institutions of imperial rule, such as the court and the palace, the army, the role of religion, and Ottoman architecture.

The seminar enquires the question of how affluence translates into influence, both on the domestic and international level via the engagement with three recently published books. With Guido Alfani’s “As Gods Among Men. A History of the Rich in the West”, the course asks what makes a person rich, what the richs’ role is in society and how either changed across history. With Katharina Pistor’s “The Code of Capital. How the law creates wealth and inequality”, the course seeks to understand the law and its international application as a core mechanism that turns affluence into influence. And with Helen Thompson’s “Disorder. Hard Times in the 21st Century”, the course assesses the implications of “aristocratic excess” on contemporary democratic politics. The seminar is an introduction to the topic and does not require any previous knowledge. However, it does require a commitment to reading substantive parts of each book.

This course examines the field of marine biology, including the fascinating diversity of marine life, their function, ecology and inter-relationships. The topics cover: a) The physical and chemical environments (e.g., light, current, atmospheric -ocean interactions, salinity, temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, nutrients) and how these may affect the marine biota; b) Important groups of marine organisms (e.g., phytoplankton, zooplankton, benthos, nekton, marine mammals) and marine food web; c) Major marine habitats and ecosystems (e.g., intertidal, benthic, pelagic, deep sea, coral reefs, mangroves); d) Exploitation of marine biological resources (e.g., fisheries and bioactive compounds); and e) Contemporary issues (e.g. climate change, marine pollution, sustainable use of marine living resources, invasive species). 

This course includes prediction using machine learning; choice of features, including for text, images, time series; model selection (e.g. linear, kernel, neural net); learning as empirical risk minimization; common machine learning techniques (linear regression, logistic regression, SVMs, kernel trick, neural nets, convolutional neural nets, kNN, k-Means); evaluating machine learning methods (cross-validation, bootstrapping, ROC, use of a baseline); and practical experience of applying machine learning methods to real data.  

This course explores the art of Europe in the long 15th century (approximately 1380-1520) with particular attention to religious culture and belief; how gender and the body were understood and expressed; the role of pilgrimage, suffrages and the saints; the differences of artistic expressions between northern Europe (e.g. Flanders) and southern (Italy); the art of crises such as witchcraft, plague and religious reform; and the ways in which naturalism and humanism challenged existing modes of artistic expression. Students also look at whether the view of the period as one steeped in pessimism, the macabre and thoughts of decay, known according to the formulation of Jan Huizinga as the "waning of the Middle Ages" is still useful. The dominant centers to be examined are the cities of Flanders and Italy, but the art of northern France, England, Germany, and elsewhere is also drawn on.

Literature is a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon that takes on many different forms in different periods, regions, and languages. In all of these forms, literature reflects in one way or another the society in which it emerges. This course connects the complex relations between literature and society and teaches how to write and speak about them in an academic way. The characteristics of narrative, interpretation, poetics, and textuality, and place literary texts and analyses in specific historical and cultural contexts are considered. Questions are considered via the analysis of one novel from a number of key theoretical perspectives in literary studies, such as narratology, memory studies, and reader-response theory. 

This course examines the atmosphere, weather and climate. It covers atmospheric processes as the driving forces of weather and climate, weather systems and world climates and their classification. Illustration of weather elements and the related fundamental physical principles, as well as their applications in studying weather and climate, will be emphasized. Major concepts and principles of meteorology and climatology constitute the core of this course. Weather systems and climate will be examined from a global perspective, yet with a regional focus on Hong Kong, mainland China and East Asia.

This course introduces the foundations of intelligent systems, such as probabilistic modeling and inference, statistical machine learning, computer vision, and robotics, to undergraduate students. Topics include Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, Kalman filters, Markov decision processes, linear regression, linear classification, and nonparametric models. Students will also learn about how these methods are applied to practical applications such as computer vision and robotics.